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GEORGE WASHINGTON 



AND OTHER 



AMERICAN ADDRESSES 



THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Globe 8vo. 55. 

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AND OTHER 



AMERICAN ADDRESSES 



BY 



FREDERIC HARRISON, M.A. 

HONORARY FELLOW OF WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD 

VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

PRESIDENT OF THE ENGLISH POSITIVIST COMMITTEE 



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1901 

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Copyright, 1901, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

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/ am permitted to Inscribe 

This Volume of Addresses given in the United States 

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THE HOX. JOSEPH FT. CHOATE 
Liu.D. 

American Ambassador in London 



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NOTE 

The following Addresses were given in February 
and March, 1901, at various Societies and Universi- 
ties of the United States. The occasion of my visit 
was an invitation with which I was honoured bv the 
Union League Club of Chicago to deliver the public 
Address in the Auditorium of that city, on the annual 
commemoration of the birthday of George Washing- 
ton. My thanks are due to the American Ambas- 
sador in London, who transmitted to me from his 
friends there this and similar invitations from various 
Universities, and who adds to his kindness by per- 
mitting me to inscribe his name on this volume. 

The first two addresses were in substance published 
in the annual Report of the celebration by the Union 
League Club of Chicago. The Lecture on the Writ- 
ings of King Alfred was published separately in May 
last. The other Addresses have not previously been 
printed. 



CONTENTS 



I. George Washington and the Republican Ideal 

II. Abraham Lincoln 

III. The Millenary of King Alfred 

IV. The Writings of King Alfred . 
V. The Dutch Republic . 

VI. Recent Biographies of Cromwell 

VII. Republicanism and Democracy 

VIII. Personal Reminiscences . 

IX. Municipal Government . 

X. The Nineteenth Century 



PAGE 

3 

3i 

4 1 

7i 

105 

141 

165 

191 

219 

237 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE 
REPUBLICAN IDEAL 



George Washington and the Republi- 
can Ideal 

Address in the Auditorium, Chicago, February 22, 1901 

We meet on a day which for more than a century- 
has been held sacred by the men of this vast Conti- 
nent — the day which ever increasing millions who 
speak our common tongue will celebrate for centuries 
to come, and hand down from generation to genera- 
tion as a national heirloom and trust. The colossal 
Republic of the West had a Founder around whose 
name gather memories more real and solid than those 
which enshrined the half-mythical founders of re- 
publics in antiquity ; whilst in valour, sagacity, and 
nobility of nature, George Washington was the peer 
of the most splendid heroes of the ancient or the 
modern world. 

The historian has too often to confess that the 
statesmen of modern times have seldom presented to 
us types of that romantic heroism, of the chivalry, the 
purity of soul, the sublime surrender of self, which we 
ascribe to a Leonidas, a Marcus Aurelius, a King 
Alfred, or a Godfrey de Bouillon. Too many of the 
chiefs who have made or saved a nation have been 



4 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

stained by faithlessness, cunning, ambition, cruelty, 
and vice. It is consoling to think — it gives us fresh 
hopes of humanity to know — that the latest in the 
roll of the creators of nations has a spotless record of 
honour as a man, as a soldier, as a statesman ; 

" Whatever record leap to light, 
He never shall be shamed — " 

Whilst his memory is revered by the civilised world 
in Europe, it is nowhere held in such personal affec- 
tion as with the people whom he defeated and whose 
dominion he shook off; for all right-minded English- 
men now feel that his work was a real gain — albeit 
a bitter lesson — to our own nation ; whilst his noble 
character and unsullied career as soldier, as statesman, 
as patriot, add new glory to our common race. George 
Washington is as much one of our great English 
heroes as Alfred the Great or Shakespeare is one of 
yours. The robust nature, the ancestral speech, are 
the common prerogatives of our blood. And as the 
wildest dreamer in Great Britain cannot conceive our 
two peoples being other than independent nations 
to-day, we have nothing but honour for the hero who 
achieved the happy and inevitable separation. 

I am well aware that since, on American soil, the 
memory of Washington has been celebrated for more 
than a century by tens of thousands of eloquent 
tongues, I ought now to pass to some more general 
theme, and not presume to add my mite to the vast 
monument which ages of impassioned oratory have 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 5 

raised to perpetuate his name. The great historian 
of Athens said in one of his pregnant phrases : " Illus- 
trious men have the whole earth for their tomb." 
How true is it that the whole American Continent 
is the tomb of Washington ; for from the Atlantic to 
the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to Behring's 
Straits, every inch of soil bears witness to his life, and 
is made sacred by his immortal presence. 

In the most memorable of all memorial orations, 
the great Athenian chief said: " — no need for prolix 
panegyrics amongst men who know it all so well." 
And I feel that it is almost presumption in a visitor 
to speak to American citizens of the Founder of their 
Republic. But since you have done this honour to 
myself — and indeed to my country — in inviting an 
Englishman to speak to you of Washington, it seems 
to be fitting that I should tell you how he looks to 
English eyes, how deeply his memory is cherished 
in the old country of his ancestors — and of your 
ancestors. 

I shall say to vou nothing that I should not say to 
my own countrymen — nothing indeed that I have 
not often said to my own countrymen. Twice before, 
in our own Hall in London, I have given addresses 
in the Centennial Commemoration of "Washington 
that we held in recent years, and I will say now noth- 
ing which I did not say then. That name is so great 
and wide that there shall be no exclusive monopoly 
in it. It cannot be limited to his State of Virginia — 
it cannot be limited to the Old States of the Union — 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

it cannot be limited to America itself. It belongs to 
the Anglo-Saxon race. It belongs in fine to Human- 
ity at large. 

Nor am I about to insult a noble memory by idle 
panegyric or extravagant words. Of all great men in 
history George Washington is he whom it would be 
most unseemly to flatter or to canonise. He, who 
was the soul of scrupulous moderation and sterling 
veracity, should teach us to treat him in that same 
spirit of self-control and truth. As the English his- 
torian of the Georgian era has said: " It was the trans- 
parent integrity of the character of Washington " which 
enabled him, soldier as he was, to found a democratic 
republic with no shadow on it of military despotism. 
It is in the spirit of aiming at transparent integrity 
that I shall seek to speak of him. I shall not pre- 
sume to speak of him as he appears to American eyes. 

1 will try to say what he seems to our English eyes. 
And perhaps the cool and independent judgment of 
those who cannot claim to be fellow-citizens of his, 
and who were once his enemies, may more accord with 
the unobtrusive genius of the great republican chief 
than that unbounded adulation in which for a hundred 
years he has been addressed and canonised here. 

The eminent historian of the Eighteenth Century 
whom I have quoted tells us this : — 

" Of all the great men in history he was the most invariably 
judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or judg- 
ment recorded of him. No act of his public life can be traced 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL J 

to personal caprice, ambition, or resentment. In the despond- 
encv of long-continued failure, in the elation of sudden success, 
at times when his soldiers were deserting by hundreds, and 
when malignant plots were formed against his reputation, amid 
the constant quarrels, rivalries, and jealousies of his subordi- 
nates, in the dark hour of national ingratitude, and in the most 
universal and intoxicating flatten", he was alwavs the same 
calm, wise, just, and single-minded man, pursuing the course 
which he believed to be right without fear or favour or fanati- 
cism; equallv free from the passions which spring from inter- 
est and from the passions that spring from imagination. He 
was in the highest sense of the word a gentleman and a man 
of honour, and he carried into public life the severest standard 
of private morals. There is scarcely another instance in his- 
torv of such a man having reached and maintained the highest 
position in the convulsions of civil war and of a great popular 
agitation." 

In England we are accustomed to draw parallels 
between the career — though not the character — of 
George Washington and that of our great Protector, 
Oliver Cromwell, and ol the Founder ot the Dutch 
Commonwealth, William the Silent, Prince of Orange. 
All three carried on in mature lite a long and desperate 
struggle in a fierce civil war against the tyranny of a 
retrograde king. All three, after beating back the 
armies of the tyrant, were chosen by their people to 
be the first chiefs of a new Commonwealth. And all 
three showed an organising genius of the first order in 
welding into a nation the broken sections of the people 
whom they had saved from slavery by their arms. 



O GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

But the parallel between William the Silent and 
George Washington is peculiarly close. These two 
in a special sense created new nations. Their work 
subsists to-day after more than three centuries in the 
first case, and more than a century in the other case. 
The direct and immediate work of Cromwell was 
quickly undone. His indirect and permanent work 
has to be traced in a number of obscure and gradual 
effects. Oliver deeply modified the history of an old 
nation : he did not create a new nation. 

The analogies of William the Silent and Washington 
lie in this. Each was the soul of an obstinate contest 
to secure self-government against a foreign monarchy. 
Both were men of birth and wealth, conservative in 
spirit, old servants and soldiers of the foreign sov- 
ereign. Both had to face defeat, disappointment, 
jealousies, discord, treachery and panic. Both, when 
raised to supreme power, showed splendid public spirit 
and devotion to their cause, and genius as statesmen 
even higher than their ability in war. The people 
whom they led to freedom were not so unequal in 
number. But, whereas the nation which the Prince 
founded remains after three centuries no larger in 
area or in population than of old, the nation which 
Washington created is amongst the greatest on earth 
— with boundless possibilities of development. 

On the other hand, in a grand point of character, 
Washington will ever stand out in history as greater 
than William — greater than almost any statesman in 
supreme place in the whole record of the modern 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 9 

world. His unshaken devotion to right, his perfect 
justice, his transparent truthfulness and lofty sense of 
honour, will ever place him above even the best of 
modern statesmen in virtue. That which sets him in 
a rank by himself among chiefs of state is the unfailing 
honour and guileless candour of his whole public career, 
toward both home and foreign opponents. Compare 
the diplomacy or the policy of Washington with that 
of Frederic the Great, or Richelieu, or Peter the Great, 
or Louis XI, or Elizabeth of England, William of 
Orange, or Oliver Cromwell — we find Washington to 
be ever what the Greek philosopher dreamed of, but 
never found in the flesh — " The man who stood four- 
square, upright, without reproach." It makes one 
more hopeful of the future and less despondent of the 
present, to know that, even in these later ages, there 
has been found a chief such that, in a desperate 
rebellion and the birth-throes of a new commonwealth, 
with treachery, intrigue and mendacity around him, 
tempting him to meet craft with craft, violence and 
injustice with fraud — " the fierce light that beats upon " 
the seat of a President as it does on a monarch's throne, 
can reveal no falsehood, no baseness, no outrage, no 
crime. 

I quoted a couplet from Tennyson's grand ode on 
the burial of our Duke of Wellington ; and I cannot 
help feeling how well many of these noble lines serve 
to describe Washington — some of them indeed more 
justly even than Wellington. 

Listen to these : — 



10 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

" O friends, our chief state-oracle is mute : 
The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, 
Whole in himself, a common good. 
Mourn for the man of amplest influence ^ 
Yet clearest of ambitious crime — 
Great in council and great in war, 
Foremost captain of his time, 
Rich in saving common-sense, 
And, as the greatest only are, 
In his simplicity, sublime — ' ' 

Are not these words as true of Washington as of 
Wellington — nay, perhaps when applied to Washing- 
ton, less marked by exaggeration or pride ? 

We often think of Washington in connection with 
our own Oliver Cromwell. Both came of old and 
honourable English families, and it is odd that it was 
the protectorate of Oliver which drove the great- 
grandfather of Washington, a zealous royalist, to 
found a new family in Virginia. Both Washington 
and Cromwell were the eldest sons of the junior branch 
of ancient and wealthy landowners. Both had only 
elementary schooling. Both were summoned before 
they were of age to protect a family of orphans ; both 
were in close alliance with the gallant family of Fair- 
fax. Both were called after passing middle life to 
direct an obstinate civil war and then to govern and 
organise a broken and distracted nation. 

In this matter the task of Washington was in one 
sense greater than that of Cromwell. England at the 
close of the civil war was still an organic whole ; and 
in the army of the Ironsides it had an overwhelming 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL II 

and solid force of disciplined enthusiasts, such as the 
world has but rarely seen. Washington's task as a 
soldier had been to organise into an army a floating 
body of raw volunteers, each of whom thought him- 
self the equal of every other citizen whatsoever, and to 
wring from local and jealous committees the essential 
supplies and funds. 

His career as a statesman was of even grander order. 
In his eight years' tenure of supreme power in the 
new nation, he had a great and peculiar task in which 
he amply succeeded. He was called not merely to 
preside over a nation, to administer a government — 
but to make a nation — to create a government. He 
found nothing but the raw material of a nation and a 
government. He left these materials an organic body, 
able to live and grow. From the first, there appeared 
that antithesis between the central and the local 
interests which in my memory has plunged the United 
States into a tremendous conflict, and in other forms 
leaves problems yet for final solution. The conduct 
of Washington in this antinomy of ideas was a per- 
fect model of wisdom and self-control. He himself, 
as a man saturated with conservative and governing 
instincts, inclined to the principle of a strong central 
authority. At the same time he saw the deep bias of 
the American people toward a local patriotism, the 
development of the physical and social peculiarities of 
the vast American Continent, and the need for extreme 
moderation for the powers to be conferred on any 
central executive. 



12 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

The consummate sagacity and dominant virtue of 
Washington united the two parties and saved the 
young commonwealth from a premature explosion of 
the struggle which began sixty years after his death. 
His second Presidency was more harassing and 
critical even than his first. But his power to ride the 
storm — to impress his spirit upon the nation — not 
by force, not by eloquence, not by logic, but by the 
apostolic power of a faultless character for rectitude, 
self-devotion and wisdom — this, I say, forms one of 
the great moral laws graven on the imperishable deca- 
logue of history, one of the consoling truths which 
cheer us in the task as we groan over those weary 
annals of the madness of nations and the ambition of 
statesmen. When the restlessness of factions sought to 
flourish the Stars and Stripes in the face of all comers, 
Washington upheld the banner he had formed as the 
emblem of neutrality, peace, consolidation, and financial 
probity. In making these ideas the mottoes of the 
commonwealth, George Washington founded the in- 
dissoluble union of an organic, industrial law-abiding 
nation, with a boundless power of expansion and a 
paradise of prosperity before it, and conferred on his 
fellow-citizens a service greater, nobler and more far- 
reaching than when he led them to victory against a 
foreign tyrant. 

And the close of such a career was in all things 
worthy of its spotless record. To compel his fellow- 
citizens to suffer him to descend from what was a seat 
of power far above the throne of monarchs, to do 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 3 

this in the maturity of his physical and mental powers, 
and solely as a great example to his successors, has 
given the world a new conception of moral dignity 
and republican simplicity. It was no case of a dicta- 
tor who, as the poet says, " stalked in savage grandeur 
home " : — it was no Charles V seeking refuge in a 
convent from disease and disappointment. It was the 
one abdication of power in recorded history that was 
based on public duty and not on personal motive. 
And now the capital city of this vast republic bears 
his name ; and his home and burial place are become 
the place of pilgrimage to the civilised world ; so 
that he lies enshrined in the central pulse and brain 
of the nation he created, his spirit, we imagine, brood- 
ing over the council-boards of his successors : — 

" And so sepulchred in such pomp doth lie, 

That Kings for such a tomb would wish to die." 

The Roman historian left this famous phrase of one 
of his characters — felix opportunitate mortis. How 
much more true is this of George Washington if we 
paraphrase it to mean — blest in all the circumstances 
of his end ! This came by a quick and easy stroke 
as he approached three-score and ten at the height of 
his reputation and authority, with the prosperous 
future of his country assured. How few of the heroes 
and creators of nations lived to see even the first fruits 
of the work of their lives ! How few have passed 
through a career beset with temptations, perils, and 



14 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

dilemmas, without once giving way to a single act of 
folly, one deed of injustice, meanness, or passion ! It 
is the unique privilege of Washington that he lived 
to see the crown of his work, and left it to his coun- 
try as a stainless record. 

It is a rare fortune when the hero can close his eyes 
with the confident hope that he has not lived in vain, 
with no crushing remorse that his memory will 
descend with a burden of offence to generations un- 
born. Heroes too often die in the midst of visible 
disaster, in agony, in humiliation — and if such great 
souls could ever lose hope, we might almost say in 
despair. Too often their dying eyes are darkened 
with gloom and gathering storms. These Christs of 
Humanity for the most part die upon their cross, 
unconscious of the future worth of their lives and of 
the distant issues which were destined to spring out 
of their sacrifice. We who to-day so crave after vis- 
ible success, who are so prone to measure every life 
by its practical result in the present, who scorn the 
labours which are not cheered by the shouts of the 
mob, with fame, with conquests, with gold, let us 
remember that the heroes to whom nations owe all 
they prize have seldom any crown of glory to dazzle 
their dying eyes, and too often lay down their weary 
heads beneath a crown of thorns. Too often they 
expire with the cruel cry within their hearts, if not 
upon their lips — Eli ! Eli ! lama sabacthani ! — 
My God ! My God ! why hast thou forsaken me? 

From this last agony of soul George Washington 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 5 

was free, as he assuredly was free from any ground 
for remorse. But he could little have conceived that, 
within one hundred years, his people would have 
increased some twenty-fold, or that this great city 
would be standing on ground which was then an 
Indian wilderness. 

There is a profound moral in the life of George 
Washington and his place in the world's history. 
Here is a simple citizen, by birth a quiet country 
gentleman, who wins triumphant success in one of the 
most memorable of modern wars, and welds into a 
nation a scattered body of colonists, so that within a 
hundred years they are grown to be one of the biggest, 
richest, most progressive people that ever existed on 
this earth. He himself is an object of veneration to 
more than a hundred millions who are of his race and 
language — even though a third of them are of the 
people he repulsed — for all who speak our common 
tongue regard him as one of the noblest figures in the 
annals of their race. And yet, he is no Alexander or 
Csesar, no Charlemagne or Napoleon. He was no 
born soldier ; he made himself a warrior by dint of an 
indomitable nature. Nor was he a dictator, such an 
one as mankind bow down to as more than man. And 
yet, does history record any result of work so rapid, 
so colossal, so multifarious ? 

The grand endowment of Washington was charac- 
ter, not imagination ; judgment, not subtlety ; not 
brilliancy, but wisdom. The wisdom of Washington 
was the genius of common-sense, glorified into unerr- 



1 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

ing truth of view. He had that true courage, physical 
and moral, that purity of soul, that cool judgment 
which is bred in the bone of the English-speaking 
race. But in Washington these qualities, not rare on 
either side of the Atlantic, were developed to a su- 
preme degree and were found in absolute perfection. 
He thus became the transfiguration of the stalwart, 
just, truthful, prudent citizen, having that essence of 
good sense which amounts to true genius, that perfec- 
tion of courage which is true heroism, that transparent 
unselfishness which seems to us the special mark of 
the saint. 

The American commonwealth was made by the 
halo of virtue, honour, and truthfulness which seemed 
to radiate from the very soul of its first President. 
May it long continue to guide the destinies of the 
republic ! It is character that makes heroes, more 
than any genius. It is character which creates nations, 
more than imagination. It is character round which 
nations rally when the stress comes on them, and con- 
fusion looms in their midst. It is character, unselfish- 
ness, honesty, and truth which in the long run rule 
the world and determine its destinies sooner or later. 
It may be often obscured, and may be long ere it is 
fully revealed. But the foremost apostle of this sacred 
gospel of noble character in these modern ages was 
the founder of the United States, who was indeed a 
star on high of the first magnitude in all that con- 
stitutes a grand and imposing nature. 

I pass on to say a few words on that republican 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL IJ 

ideal, of which George Washington furnishes the 
eternal type. When I utter the phrase republican 
ideal there comes into my mind the memory of that 
wonderful picture of it in the noblest of all speeches 
as recorded by the greatest of all historians — the 
Funeral Oration of Pericles in Thucydides. 

" The republican government," he says, " is one that feels 
no jealousy or rivalry with the institutions of others. We 
have no wish to imitate them ; we prefer to be an example to 
them. It is true that our constitution is a democracy, for 
it is framed in the interest of all, not of any privileged class. 
Yet, whilst the law secures to all in their private claims 
equal justice without favour of persons, we still recognise the 
value of personal superiority, when a citizen is in any way 
distinguished by his attainments ; and he is raised to eminence 
in the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the 
prize of his merits. Nor again is poverty a bar with us, to 
hinder a citizen who can confer some service on the state. 
Public office is a career open to great capacity, however 
humble may be the station in which it is found. Public life 
is with our people absolutely free to all. In our private life 
we are not suspicious of each other, nor do we quarrel with 
a citizen who chooses to live his own life just as it pleases 
himself. But whilst ours is the land of perfect liberty to 
each citizen to live freely as it suits him, we are bound by 
loyalty to the common law which we reverence as the voice 
of the republic. We obey only the law which is ordained to 
protect every man from wrong doing. And we respect the 
unwritten law of public opinion which visits those who trans- 
gress the moral code with the reprobation of their fellow- 
citizens. 



1 8 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

" Nor do we forget to provide relaxations after the urgent 
labour of our lives. We hold regular festivals and solemn 
thanksgivings on the appointed days throughout the year. 
In our homes our mode of life is cheerful so that we banish 
all sense of gloom. The vastness of our republic affords us 
all the fruits and resources of the entire earth, of which all 
the goods that it affords flow freely in to us, and we enjoy 
the products of other lands as easily as those of our own land. 
Our state is open to the world and is the resort of men from 
other countries. We welcome the foreigner who comes to 
us, and leave him free to inspect all we have to show him 
and to profit by all that we can teach him. We rely not on 
cunning devices and secret intrigues, but we trust our own 
right arms, our own stout hearts. We are not ground down 
by a conscription, which makes every citizen a compulsory 
soldier ; yet, when the call of our country comes, we can 
show a front as brave as any, and we prove to them that the 
volunteer citizen in arms is at least the match of the con- 
script who is forced to pass his youth in the barrack. 

" As men, we love all things that are beautiful, yet our 
taste is for the simple and plain. We delight in mental 
culture, but it does not make us the weaker in action. 
Wealth we use for practical ends of a real kind, not to boast 
of or to display to the world. It is no disgrace to a citizen 
to avow that he is a poor man ; the true disgrace is to be too 
idle to earn his own living. Our citizens do not neglect the 
affairs of the republic, because they are absorbed in the affairs 
of their own household and fortune. And those who are 
occupied with their private business find time to take a very 
active part in politics. It is our way that the citizen who is 
utterly indifferent to public affairs is looked on as a drone. 
It is not for every citizen to take the lead in dictating a 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 1 9 

policy; but he is bound to be a sound judge of the policy 
submitted to his acceptance. We count the true mischief 
in public policy to lie, not in effective discussion of the 
platforms before the nation, but rather in adopting a policy 
without that knowledge of the facts which serious discussion 
would impart. The gift of our people is to be able to look 
all round a problem before we take it up in action, and then 
to act when reflection has done its work. Whereas we know 
there are people who rush into difficulties with the heedless- 
ness of ignorance, and then, when they begin to understand 
all it means, entirely lose heart. 

" To sum it all up together, we may boast that our com- 
monwealth is the school of the civilised world. Each citizen 
of our republic is endowed with the power in his own person 
of adapting himself to the most varied form of activity and 
life with consummate versatility and ease. This is no pass- 
ing and idle word, but truth and fact ; the proof of which 
lies in the splendid position which our republic now holds in 
the world to-day. There is a latent strength within us, 
which ever rises above even all that our neighbours expect 
that we can show. The enemies whom we overcome on 
the battle-field submit to be defeated by a power so great , 
and those who have to bear our empire admit that their 
master is worthy to bear rule. Of this there are ample 
witnesses, in those mighty monuments of our power which 
will make us the wonder of this age and ages to come. It 
needs no rhetoric to prove it. Every land and every sea 
bears witness to our energy and our valour, and on every soil 
we have planted eternal memorials of the good we can do to 
our friends and the harm we could inflict upon our foes." 

Such is the type of the republic painted by the 
great statesman of Athens at the zenith of her glory. 



20 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

How far it is reproduced — how far it can be repro- 
duced in our age, it is not for me to say. There are 
some features in the picture which are essential ele- 
ments of the true republic. The essence of a republic 
is a state where power is reserved not to privilege but 
to merit, where it is exercised in the sole interest of 
the community, and never in the interest of any class 
or order. In the true republic all authority is a trust 
committed by the commonwealth to those who are 
held capable of using it best in the common service of 
all. Nothing hereditary can remain in it. Birth can- 
not create any privilege, any priority in honour, power, 
or right of any kind. And as in the true republic 
there is no privilege for birth, so neither is there any 
privilege for wealth. The service of the state, even in 
its highest post, must be freely open to every citizen, 
whatever his birth, his breeding, or his means, provided 
only he be capable to fill it. There is no title to any 
public ofHce but personal worthiness alone ; there is 
no lawful object of public activity, but the common 
interest of the community at large. 

There are three tests of the true republic — (i) that 
power rests on fitness to rule ; (2) that its sole object 
is the public good; (3) that it is maintained by public 
opinion, and not by force. That is to say, public 
office — all office from the highest to the least — is a 
public trust — I mean a moral trust, not a syndicate 
— and it is not private property. It must rest on 
consent, not on fear, and not on right or privilege. 
This is not the same thing as an absolute democracy, 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 21 

or an absolute equality. Every citizen has an equal 
claim to serve the state, but every citizen is not 
equally able to serve it. And if all did actually serve 
it at once, the state would be very ill served. The 
true republic needs the best. By best, it means the 
worthiest, apart from birth or wealth. And the best 
must be acknowledged as such by common consent. 

It must be allowed that in ancient and modern 
times this ideal republic has hardly ever been reached, 
or only for rare and occasional moments. In the 
Roman republic we know how strong was the hold of 
privilege, how arrogant were the claims of birth, how 
desperate the struggles of patrician and plebeian, of 
the nobles and the proletariat. Indeed, the titles of 
personal merit to public office were often recognised 
better in the empire of the Antonines and the Con- 
stantines than in the republic of the Catos and the 
Pompeys. 

At Athens, the republic oscillated too often between 
weak aristocrats and unscrupulous demagogues. And 
both Athens and Rome were poisoned by the institu- 
tion of slavery and a vast population of slaves, whom 
the free minority regarded as their chattels and prop- 
erty. Both states were really narrow aristocracies of 
free men within unlimited despotisms of serfs. 

The mediaeval republics, in the same way, rested 
largely on force ; and in no small degree on privilege 
and birth. The United Provinces of Holland were 
mainly a plutocracy, until they passed into an heredi- 
tary monarchy. In France, the first republic of the 



22 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

Convention and the Consulate was mainly based on 
force. Neither in the first nor in the second republic 
was merit peculiarly honoured. And the third republic 
has been shaken to its foundations by birth, wealth, 
and privileged corporations. Europe, alas ! never 
has given the world, does not give it now, the ex- 
ample of a true and typical republic. 

We must look to the great republic of the West for 
a closer approach to the true republican ideal. There 
indeed we have the principal conditions adequately 
and permanently recognised. Office — supreme office 
— is absolutely open to every citizen, whatever his 
birth, or fortune, or social standing. And this in a 
degree which has never been accomplished in ancient 
or modern republics. The whole forces of the re- 
public, again, are devoted to the public benefit of the 
community as a whole ; not to the interests of any 
order or class of citizens — at least this has been the 
case since the final extinction of slavery ; and, we 
ought to say, it is at any rate the avowed purpose of 
the majority. And as to the third condition, you will 
be ready to say that never did any government rest 
so entirely on consent ; for no government that this 
world ever yet saw was based upon the free suffrages 
of twelve millions of independent electors. 

I may be asked why did I qualify this statement as 
to the United States ; who can doubt that it is the 
absolute and perfect type of the true ideal republic ? 
It is not for a foreign visitor to criticise the house of 
his hosts ; but to the philosophers of Europe there 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 23 

are spots even upon the sun of the American common- 
wealth. If it be true that the offices of the state, from 
the highest to the lowest, are open to every American 
citizen, is it clear that they are always filled by the 
worthiest men that the American continent has reared ? 
If birth and wealth confer no title to power, is it cer- 
tain that they do not sometimes act as a positive bar 
to merit ? If it be true that the laws and forces of 
the commonwealth are in principle entirely devoted to 
the good of all, is it certain that they are not at times 
captured in the interest of minorities, classes, or corpo- 
rations ? At least, so American authorities of high 
reputation are believed publicly to maintain. And 
when we come to the third condition, that the govern- 
ment rests entirely on consent and to no degree on 
force, it is reported in Europe that this must be quali- 
fied somewhat in matters of colour and race. I hope, 
before I return, I may be convinced that the report 
is untrue. But in any case, if consent and not force 
be the rule in the United States, there are now, we 
hear, some eight or ten millions outside these states, 
whom the republic governs, but has no intention of 
admitting to vote. 

All these questions are problems in the social eco- 
nomy of states of which thinking men in Europe are 
anxiously watching the solution. We wait to see 
how a vast democratic electorate can be educated 
always to choose its foremost citizens in every ser- 
vice, even though the foremost be the least conspicu- 
ous and the least ambitious. We want to see how 



24 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

the state is going to deal with those gigantic corpora- 
tions, which have taken the place of the feudal barons 
and royal favourites of modern Europe. And lastly, 
we wait to see how government of the people, by the 
people and through the people, will be reconciled with 
the government of all these millions, whose consent is 
never going to be asked at all. When we turn in 
thought to the ideal republic we must have in our 
mind's eye the highest possible standard. And, with 
ideal standards before us, no actual republic that men 
have created can be judged to have reached perfection 
— no ! neither the Athens of Pericles, nor the United 
States of President McKinley, with all the points of 
likeness between them that certainly exist. 

A republican myself from my youth upwards, I am 
one who holds that the essence of republic is more 
bound up with good government than it is with the 
active share in government by all citizens alike. The 
interests of all equally are more important than the 
rights of any section or any individual. Pericles was 
right when he proudly boasted that their citizens 
could " recognise the value of personal superiority," 
for Pericles led the Athenians far more than followed 
them. Unless the wise man leads and the simple 
follow his lead, the ideal republic suffers, for its 
power is not awarded to the most fit. If the blind 
lead those who see, both the blind and those who see 
fall into the ditch. 

I am, I say, by principle and by conviction, a re- 
publican, because the republic is the inevitable and 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 25 

final form of human society — the normal type of 
intelligent citizenship. It must dominate the future, 
for the future society must be an industrial society. 
Whatever else is doubtful, it is certain that the de- 
velopment of industrial life will be the key-note of the 
generations to come. Now industry is, of its nature, 
essentially republican ; its life is the free cooperation 
of intelligent masses of men working with good-will to 
the common interest. Industrial life must ultimately 
eliminate every remnant of privilege, of caste, of 
monopoly, of prerogative ; for the more highly organ- 
ised industry becomes, the more perfectly it demands 
the intelligent and free cooperation of workers. 
Slavery dies out before the sight of free industry. 
Military or feudal types of society, with caste, privi- 
lege, idleness, mastery blazoned on their mediaeval 
heraldry, may struggle for their ancient rank, but in- 
dustry will slay them in the end. An industrial world 
— and the world of the future grows more and more 
an industrial world — is a republican world. And a 
republican world is one in which the state belongs to 
all, exists for all, and lives by the help and good-will 
of all. 

I began to-day with George Washington ; and I 
come back to George Washington at the end. I 
trust that the American people will evermore look 
back to Washington as the type of the republican 
chief. To look back to Washington for guidance and 
inspiration is to look forward to the future, for it is 
to fix the eye on the ideal, on the model, which 



26 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 

neither you nor any people on this earth have ever yet 
perfectly attained. During the Presidencies of Wash- 
ington, this republic was indeed guided by its most 
capable citizen ; not by force, not by submission, but 
by persuasion and conviction in a way that has hardly 
ever occurred in the history of mankind, if it were 
not in the days of Trajan, King Alfred, and William 
the Silent. If there is any point in his career to be 
regretted, it is that he did not consent to remain in his 
great office, so long as his own powers lasted. Per- 
sonally I believe in republican government ; I believe 
in Presidential rather than parliamentary government ; 
and I believe in retention of office by choice of the 
citizens so long as capacity to serve them remains. 

If Washington's Presidencies give the type of gov- 
ernment by the most capable, assuredly they give the 
type of government by consent of the citizens. Never 
before or since has authority been wielded by man 
over his fellow-men with more absolute unanimity of 
the common desire. He anticipated the great social 
reformation accomplished in this commonwealth some 
sixty years after his death, when he freed his own 
estate by will from the curse of negro slavery. No 
man that ever bore power over his fellow-citizens 
shrank with a more scrupulous, more religious horror 
from the thought of ruling by force instead of by free 
choice — no man was more truly the republican to 
the very marrow of his bones, and was less the despot 
or the master. May the spirit of George Washington, 
the just, the free, the far-sighted patriot, inspire the 



GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE REPUBLICAN IDEAL 27 

people of this commonwealth in all their problems of 
government ; guide them in all the tasks they under- 
take to wise and prosperous ends ; enable them to 
crown his work when in the words of our English 
historian, " he founded a democratic republic with no 
shadow on it of military despotism." 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



Abraham Lincoln 

Address at the Banquet, Union League Club, Chicago, Febru- 
ary 22, 1901 

Mr. President and gentlemen of the Union League 
Club : I feel myself overwhelmed by the kindness of 
the reception which I have received and by the hos- 
pitality which this great institution has been good 
enough to afford to me. Although I am now enter- 
ing upon the close of my life, it is the first time that I 
have had the opportunity of crossing the Atlantic 
and seeing with my own eyes the great republic which 
I have watched with great interest and affection, I may 
say, for the last fifty years of my life. 

I have many American friends ; I have received 
many invitations to visit them in this country ; I have 
never been able to accept those invitations, but when, 
last autumn, I had the great honour of being invited by 
the president of the Union League Club to speak on 
this memorable day, the birthday of Washington, and 
that invitation was conveyed to me by the highly 
popular and respected representative of the American 
nation in England, Mr. Choate, I felt, sir, that that 
invitation was that which our politicians speak of, when 
they are called by the sovereign of our country at 

31 



32 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



Windsor Castle, as a royal command. I felt, sir, as if 
I had received a command to speak, with however 
humble a voice, to the American people, to represent 
the sympathy and regard that our nation feels for the 
American republic and its infinite destinies in the 
future, and above all, to tell them of the admiration, 
of the profound homage with which the founder of 
the American republic is looked upon by all rational 
people of Great Britain to-day. 

I well knew that it was from no thought of merit 
of my own that I had been honoured by this invitation, 
but, having received it and having had the advantage 
of listening to the words of our great orators, Mr. 
Cobden and Mr. Bright, whom I well remember, 
whom I have often heard speak with so bold a spirit 
during the great struggle that was endured by this 
nation in my own youth — I felt that I was bound 
to come forward to-day and say all that in my heart I 
have felt of their people and of their great founder. 
This city of Chicago appeals to me in a very especial 
manner above all the other cities of the United States, 
for the personal reason that I believe that I am my- 
self, at this moment, older than the city of Chicago ; 
because I am told in the histories that at my birth it 
was a village of but one hundred inhabitants, and 
when I was a young man, taking my degree in col- 
lege, it was a very small town, hardly known on the 
other side of the Atlantic. But I come now and I see 
that it is undoubtedly the second city in the Union. 
Its history is one of the most remarkable facts in the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 33 

material development of the nineteenth century ; its 
wealth, its power, its population portend almost an 
infinite development in the future. I have now been 
able to see with my own eyes and through the instru- 
mentality of the many friends here about me, the cul- 
ture, intellectual development, and patriotic spirit 
which this city has already developed. 

I was deeply interested this morning in seeing that 
remarkable gathering when the young people of this 
great city were brought together to have instilled into 
their minds ideas of true patriotic spirit and the sense 
of devotion to their duties in order to become worthy 
citizens of this republic. Now I should be very sorry 
if it were thought that what I have been saying of 
Washington to-day was in any sense addressed for the 
moment or to meet the audience to which I had the 
honour of speaking. On the contrary, I well know 
that the spirit of Washington, his courage, his patri- 
otic interest to the people of his country, have been 
carried on in later years by his successors in that great 
office, and I may recall, perhaps, my own interest as a 
young man many years ago during the great struggle 
in which this nation was concerned, the thrill of sym- 
pathy, the sense of shock which we received when we 
heard of the death of that great successor of Washing- 
ton, whose portrait, I see, adorns the rooms of this 
club. I was present upon the occasion of the an- 
nouncement of the death of that great President of the 
republic. We called a meeting in the largest available 
hall in London, which was draped in black for the 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

occasion, and our foremost politicians came forward 
and spoke of the admiration with which they had re- 
garded his career, and of the profound sympathy that 
they felt for the tremendous struggle with which this 
nation was engaged. I may say Abraham Lincoln 
was always to me, in my youth, the type of the repub- 
lican chief, and I looked upon him as indeed a worthy 
successor of the founder of the republic himself. 

I should like to recall a few remarks that I made 
in a little volume which, I dare say, very few people 
ever read, and of which I don't suppose there is a 
single copy in existence, except the one in my posses- 
sion. If I venture to inflict upon you a few com- 
ments of mine, it is only for this purpose, to convince 
you that during that great struggle, which is now very 
nearly forty years ago, there were many of us who 
followed every incident of that immense crisis with all 
the feelings that animated you whom I see before me, 
or perhaps, as most of you have evidently the advan- 
tage of me in years, which animated your fathers and 
the previous generation. I don't know how many of 
you actually took part in that heroic struggle, but to 
us it came home precisely as if we were engaged in it 
from day to day ourselves. And the end of the Presi- 
dent in that great crisis was to us as deeply affecting 
as it was to any one of you or to your fathers. 

It is now nearly forty years ago since I published 
in England the following remarks : — 

"... The great struggle which has for ever decided the 
cause of slavery of man to man, is, beyond all question, the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



35 



most critical which the world has seen since the great revolu- 
tionary outburst. If ever there was a question which was to 
test political capacity and honesty it was this. A true states- 
man, here if ever, was bound to forecast truly the issue, and to 
judge faithfully the cause at stake. We know now, it is 
beyond dispute, that the cause which won was certain to win 
in the end, that its reserve force was absolutely without limit, 
that its triumph was one of the turning-points in modern civ- 
ilisation. It was morally certain to succeed, and it did suc- 
ceed with an overwhelming and mighty success. From first 
to last both might and right went all one way. The people 
of England went wholly that way. The official classes went 
wholly some other way. 

" One of the great key-notes of England's future is simply 
this — what will be her relations with that great republic ? 
If the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are to form two 
phases of one political movement, their welfare and that of the 
world will be signally promoted. If their courses are marred 
by jealousies or contests, both will be fatally retarded. Real 
confidence and sympathy extended to that people in the hour 
of their trial would have forged an eternal bond between us. 
To discredit and distrust them, then, was to sow deep the 
seeds of antipathy. Yet, although a union in feeling was of 
importance so great, although so little would have secured it, 
the governing classes of England wantonly did all they could 
to foment a breach. 

" A great political judgment fell upon a race of men, our 
own brothers ; the inveterate social malady they inherited came 
to a crisis. We watched it gather with exultation and insult. 
There fell on them the most terrible necessity which can befall 
men, the necessity of sacrificing the flower of their citizens in 
civil war, of tearing up their civil and social system by the 



36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

roots, of transforming the most peaceful type of society into 
the most military. We magnified and shouted over every 
disaster; we covered them with insult; we filled the world 
with ominous forebodings and unjust accusations. There 
came on them one awful hour when the powers of evil seemed 
almost too strong ; when any but a most heroic race would 
have sunk under the blows of their traitorous kindred. We 
chose that moment to give actual succour to their enemy, and 
stabbed them in the back with a wound which stung their 
pride even more than it crippled their strength. They dis- 
played the most splendid examples of energy and fortitude 
which the modern world has seen, with which the defence of 
Greece against Asia, and of France against Europe, alone can 
be compared in the whole annals of mankind. They devel- 
oped almost ideal civic virtues and gifts ; generosity, faith, 
firmness ; sympathy the most affecting, resources the most 
exhaustless, ingenuity the most magical. They brought forth 
the most beautiful and heroic character who in recent times 
has ever led a nation, the only blameless type of the statesman 
since the days of Washington. Under him they created the 
purest model of government which has yet been seen on the 
earth — a whole nation throbbing into one great heart and 
brain, one great heart and brain giving unity and life to a 
whole nation. The hour of their success came; unchequered 
in the completeness of its triumph, unsullied by any act of 
vengeance, hallowed by a great martyrdom." 

Mr. President, I have only ventured to refer to 
those words of mine in order that I may assure you 
and the members of this Club that I have been deeply 
interested in the fortunes of the great American repub- 
lic ever since I was a youth fresh from school and col- 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 37 

lege. I have felt throughout the whole of my life the 
same sympathy with the destinies of this great nation, 
and I shall carry back to my own people the assurance 
of the friendliness and kindness with which they always 
receive an English guest, and also the sense that in all 
things intellectual, moral, and spiritual the two peoples 
are indissolubly united in thought and in idea, whilst 
in things practical and in the political sphere they hope 
to preserve for ever a thoroughly good understanding 
and a common fellowship, working their own national 
conceptions out in independent lines. 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

d. 901 



The Millenary of King Alfred (d. 901 



Address at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 

Within a few months, in the present year, the 
various peoples in both hemispheres and on either 
side of the Equator who speak our English tongue, 
will unite in commemorating the thousandth anniver- 
sary of the death of King Alfred — the purest, noblest, 
most venerable hero of which their race can boast. 
There are few other names in the records of human 
civilisation, the memory of which has been so per- 
manent, so unbroken, so definite, and at the same time 
so certain. And there is certainly no other character 
in history whose image remains to this day perfectly 
heroic, faultless, majestic, and saintly in all relations of 
public or of private life. 

History, especially the remorseless criticism of mod- 
ern scholarship, has torn the halo from many a famous 
hero, and has exposed the fraud or superstition which 
built up so many of our cherished legends and anec- 
dotes. But if it has cleared the memory of Alfred 
from some pleasing and some trivial myths, which 
were solemnly believed by our fathers, it has really 
made the historic Alfred a more heroic and impressive 
figure than the legendary figure of our boyhood. The 
true Alfred is even greater than the poetic Alfred. 

41 



42 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

And whatever records have " leaped to light," as our 
poet has it, and whatever tales have been flung aside 
in the process of research, no weakness, no crime, no 
error, no falsehood, no cruelty have ever been revealed 
in his career. 

It is true that the scale of the achievements of such 
mighty men of old as Alexander, Julius Caesar, and 
Charlemagne, is immeasurably greater, and their per- 
manent influence on human history as a whole has 
been infinitely wider, as their tradition is older and 
more diffused amongst the nations to-day. But their 
influence is to be traced in so many undefined and 
indirect results that it can with difficulty be grasped 
in a manner quite definite, with the same intensity, 
national and racial, as that of Alfred. And undoubt- 
edly no one of these immortal founders of kingdoms 
and of eras, nor can any other historic founder of a 
nation, compare with our Alfred in beauty of soul and 
in variety of genius and grace. 

We are quite justified also in speaking of the his- 
tory of Alfred as conspicuously certain and clear. An 
immense amount of controversy has been carried on 
in England, America, and Germany as to certain 
details of Alfred's life — the exact dates of his death 
and even of his birth are disputed, the extent of his 
learning, the age at which he learned to read and to 
understand Latin, a variety of characteristic anecdotes, 
and some personal peculiarities and feats. It is true 
that doubts continue as to the authenticity and gen- 
uineness of our principal authority, the Life by 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 43 

Asser^ which, at best, is mixed with interpolations, 
misconceptions, and errors. And doubts exist as to 
Alfred's being in any sense the author of some books 
attributed to him, and as to what degree he is the 
author of books in which he certainly had a hand. 

But all these things are more or less superficial and 
practically unimportant. The date of Alfred's death 
might be of great significance if certain events occurred 
at this time, or if certain men or movements ought or 
ought not to be treated as contemporary with him. 
But inasmuch as we know almost nothing of any real 
mark as taking place in any of the years 899, 900, or 
901, it becomes a mere arithmetical or paleographical 
problem to which of the three we attribute the death. 
Absolutely nothing can turn on it, any more than 
whether he died on the 24th or the 26th of October. 
Historians have long agreed that 901 was the date of 
Alfred's death, — how, where, and why he died at 
fifty-two they knew not. The whole controversy turns 
on such questions as whether the scribe in a manu- 
script of the Saxon Chronicle put the date 901 exactly 
in the right line of his margin, and at what day of 
what month the West Saxons at that time ordinarily 
counted the commencement of the year. After study- 
ing a great deal of warm controversy on the subject, 
I incline to the view that the year 900 is the more 
likely to be correct. But the matter is to me too 
much like the solution of a chess problem ; and I 
rather regret to see so much ingenuity exhausted on 
the point. It would be far more to the purpose if 



44 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

they could tell us whether Alfred was six feet high, 
or if his eyes were blue or dark. None of these 
things have we any means of knowing ; and it is a 
pity to draw off the attention of the public from the 
grand and certain facts of Alfred's career. Since the 
Christian world continues to commemorate the birth 
of Christ at a date which has long been known to 
be historically inaccurate, the Commemoration Com- 
mittee wisely resolved to adhere to the recognised and 
popular date. 

I confess that I feel little interest in solving these 
petty problems of detail — all the more that I very 
much doubt if they ever can be finally settled. For 
myself, after no little reading and hesitation, I incline 
to believe that the Life of Asser is substantially 
genuine, and is accurate in the main ; though it is 
certainly corrupt, defaced by palpable forgeries, and 
some original errors. I incline to believe that the 
pretty story of the boy Alfred learning to read has 
foundation in fact, though the circumstances and his 
own age at the time present hopeless inconsistencies 
and confusion. It is quite possible that the legend 
about the cakes may have had some basis of truth, 
but we can say no more. It may have come from a 
popular ballad, as probably came the story of the 
harper in the Danes' camp. The story of S. Neot, 
and the school at Oxford, are known to be pure 
inventions of later ages. The name of the King has 
certainly been given to some books which he did not 
write. And some of his deeds are demonstrably im- 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 45 

possible ; and others which are possible, seem to have 
been unknown to his own age. 

But, when all deductions are made and all doubtful 
tales are rejected, enough remains to give us a com- 
plete picture of the man himself and unimpeachable 
evidence of his essential achievements. There is the 
record of the Chronicle during Alfred's life, as trust- 
worthy as the commentaries of Caesar and probably- 
dictated by the King himself. There is the general 
picture of character to be extracted from Asser, his 
friend and companion. We have undoubted writings 
by Alfred himself — the Pastoral Care with its preface, 
the Orosius with its insertions, and above all the 
Boethius with its abundant original matter — so largely 
an autobiography or the personal meditations of the 
King himself. Lastly, we have the immense body of 
Saxon and English annals and poems testifying to a 
persistent tradition, if not to positive facts. Out 
of all these sources we get a perfectly definite and 
thoroughly consistent picture of a nature of singular 
beauty and power ; of a career as warrior, statesman, 
churchman, and lawgiver of incalculable importance 
to the existence and formation of the nation he in- 
spired and ruled. The principal deeds of Alfred as 
king are quite as certain as those of Charlemagne, 
or William the Conqueror, or Edward I. And we 
know the inner spirit of Alfred far better than we 
shall ever know theirs. 

This is the age of minute historical research and we 
ought to be on our guard never to become its dupes 



46 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

or its slaves. Of course absolute truth and the most 
scrupulous accuracy of fact are quite indispensable ; 
and deliberate neglect of either must be the final con- 
demnation of anyone found guilty thereof. Every 
historian must desire to have over his labours the 
epitaph that the late Bishop Creighton is said to have 
composed for himself — "he tried to write true his- 
tory." But the extraordinary zeal with which paleo- 
graphy is pursued and the infinite sub-divisions of 
this curious learning have caused historical problems 
to be treated too much in sectional and mechanical 
modes, which make us too prone to trust our general 
judgment to mere technical experts. We have seen 
the dangers of giving too much weight in a criminal 
trial to the expert graphologist, or professor of " chei- 
romancy," who is positive that a line of handwriting 
is the work of one particular person, or the expert in 
painting who knows how much of a picture is genuine 
and how much is spurious. A famous judge was 
wont to say that witnesses in a patent case might be 
divided into three classes — (1) liars, (2) d — d liars, 
and (3) " experts " — to which someone added a fourth 
class consisting of one too famous professional witness. 
What I mean is, that due attention should be paid 
to the opinion of qualified experts in handwriting, 
paleography, style, dialect, and so forth, especially 
when they agree, which they rarely do. But many 
other considerations have to be taken into account, on 
which few "experts" are at all expert. One scholar 
says — Homer never speaks of writing. Ergo, the 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 



47 



Iliad and the Odyssey were preserved solely by oral 
tradition. Then comes a learned archaeologist who 
finds some marks which he cannot decipher, and which 
he believes to be much earlier than Homer. Ergo, 
he says, Homer's poems were written by the poet. 
The bone of a Cave-bear is found with some rude 
figures on it : this proves man, they say, to have been 
an artist twenty thousand years ago. A copy of the 
Saxon Chronicle is said to have the date in its margin 
the eighth of an inch too high. Ergo, Alfred died in 
899 and not in 901. I express no opinion on any- 
thing of these discoveries. I am far from undervalu- 
ing them, and feel that they merit close attention. 
But I say — Not too fast ; there are many other 
things to consider ; there are hardly ten men acces- 
sible whose opinion on these points is conclusive ; and 
there are a dozen modes in which the fact now ob- 
served may be explained without our accepting the 
momentous conclusions that are claimed. A mere 
expert, like fire, is a good servant, but a bad master. 
I deal with these points because some persons have 
suggested as objection to the Millenary Commemora- 
tion this year, that it is more probable that Alfred 
died in 899, or in 900, and not in 901. Again it has 
been suggested that Alfred was born not in 849, as all 
the ordinary histories tell us, but in 842, which 
would make him seven years older. This would 
make things easier all round. It would be far more 
reasonable if Ethelwulf sent his son, then aged thir- 
teen, to Rome, instead of sending a child of four on so 



48 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

long and difficult a journey. And he might very- 
well have won the beautiful book and learned to read 
at the age of twelve with his own mother Osburga, 
who might then have been living. In that case Alfred 
would have been thirty when he began to reign, in- 
stead of twenty-two, and would have been fifty-eight, 
or even fifty-nine, at his death, which makes more 
conceivable the enormous amount of his life's work. 
But against this stands the distinct statement of the 
Chronicle and also of Asser in his Life, the authority 
for both of which must have been Alfred himself, that 
he began to reign at the age of twenty-two. 

Now, I refer to these points, still in dispute by the 
experts, simply to show that the matters which are 
doubtful about Alfred are not matters which affect our 
estimate of Alfred's character or Alfred's achievements. 
There are people who will object to anything and give 
all kinds of trivial reasons. A very great personage, 
who is a statesman as well as an historian, says that 
Alfred "is a myth." He might as well say St. Paul 
" is a myth," because he does not believe in the tradi- 
tion of his foot marks in the Mamertine Prison in 
Rome or of the — Domine, Quo Vadis ? — in thefuori 
le Mura anecdote. There are many things as to St. 
Paul, of which we are not certain, and some stories 
which we know to be fictions. And so, there are 
some things about Alfred of which we are not cer- 
tain, and some things which we know to be fiction. 
But St. Paul and Alfred both wrote some authentic 
and genuine pieces in which their whole souls are 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 49 

shown. Both had intimate companions who cer- 
tainly recorded the essential facts of their lives. And, 
though we are not quite certain in which of three 
years Alfred died, nor of what he died, nor where, or 
what was his exact age at death, we do know for cer- 
tain how vast was the work of his life in the history of 
his country, and we do know what the real Alfred was 
as hero, statesman, and saint. 

Again, there are people who grumble about any 
millenary, and others who sneer at the word itself. 
Well ! millenary is quite as natural and correct a term 
as centenary — and of centenaries we hear more than 
enough. In the nature of things, there will be very 
few millenaries possible. The mere fact that the 
memory of a great thinker or statesman keeps bright 
for a thousand years is a striking phenomenon which 
we ought to emphasise with all our power. It is the 
death always, not the birth, we should commemorate. 
What had happened in the world when Alfred saw 
the light ? It was a time of confusion, trouble, and 
despair. What happened when Alfred died, was this. 
The purest spirit that ever spoke our mother tongue 
lay in its last rest. England was saved from barbar- 
ism and from heathendom. The civilisation of Eng- 
land began in earnest — and for a thousand years it 
has grown larger and grander. 

Let us turn to the things of which we are certain 
and wherein Alfred's greatness is clear as the sun at 
noon. He was a mighty soldier — a hero — with 
consummate genius for war. An historian who has 



50 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

written an excellent History of the Art of War for the 
Middle Ages, has treated Alfred as warrior, and made 
clear all the essential points, though many details of 
his tactics still remain obscure. Alfred's youth was 
passed in the midst of the death-struggle of Saxons 
and Angles with the Danes and Vikings. For two 
generations they had been cutting England to pieces, 
and whilst he was a boy, they had begun to fix them- 
selves in fortified camps along the coast. The Saxons 
had no forts, no fleet, no regular armies, and but few 
soldiers wearing defensive armour and trained to war. 
The Vikings had all these. They were pirates, adven- 
turers, conquerors, with a genius for enterprise and 
desultory fighting, splendid seamen, trained warriors 
of undaunted courage and resource. And they had 
now learned the use of horses, more as mounted 
infantry than regular cavalry. In fact they were much 
like the Boers under de Wet ; and the Saxons were 
like the British at Majuba or Stormberg. 

England and the Continent, what we now call 
France, Belgium, and Flolland, were equally at the 
mercy of these terrible invaders. And the period from 
Alfred's birth to his thirtieth year was the darkest time 
of all for Christian Europe. The heirs of Charles the 
Great, the heirs of our Egbert, were alike defeated in 
turn — London, Winchester, Paris, and Tours were 
sacked and destroyed. Then York was stormed, the 
Northumbrian kings slain and their kingdom blotted 
out. Then the Mercian kingdom was attacked, and 
the East Anglian king slaughtered. Alfred was twenty- 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 51 

two when the " grand army" of the Vikings descended 
upon Wessex, seized Reading, and entrenched them- 
selves along the Thames. They were carrying all 
before them, when Alfred and his brother Ethelred, 
then king of Wessex, came up with them at Ashdown, 
in the " Vale of the White Horse." We have prime 
accounts of the battle : how Alfred would not wait for 
the king who remained to hear mass, but charged up 
hill " as furious as a wild boar " — how the battle raged 
till nightfall — how the heathen were smitten hip and 
thigh — how their king, five earls, and thousands of 
pagans were slain, and the enemy routed and chased 
for two days. This grand victory is always ascribed to 
Alfred's personal valour and leadership. He was but 
twenty-two. 

But this glorious victory did not save Wessex. In 
a few weeks the Danes rallied, defeated Ethelred again 
and again, and finally killed him, when Alfred became 
King at twenty-two. He was now in the thick of war, 
driven back from Berkshire into Wiltshire, with inces- 
sant battles, not unfrequent victories in the field, fol- 
lowed by disastrous retreats, as his worn forces grew 
smaller and more exhausted. In that year, says the 
veracious Chronicle, dictated perhaps by Alfred him- 
self, nine general battles were fought against the army 
south of Thames, besides frequent raids, and nine 
earls and one king of the Vikings were slain. 

But, after this mutual slaughter, both sides were 
exhausted ; and Alfred obtained a truce for Wessex 
perhaps by a judicious subsidy. It was nothing but a 



52 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

truce, as he well knew, but it gave him invaluable time 
to recruit. His eye of genius perceived that he must 
stop this endless flow from the north, and deprive the 
invaders of their command of the sea, which had given 
them the advantage of mobility. Alfred built galleys 
and long ships, and brought in Danes and Norsemen 
from across the Channel to teach his people seamanship. 
He now began to win naval victories, and protect his 
own southern coasts, on which one hundred and twenty 
galleys of the Vikings were wrecked after an engage- 
ment with Alfred's formidable fleet. But whilst the 
King was in the far west, where he overcame the Danes 
at Exeter, a new body from the northeast burst into 
Wessex and planted themselves in Wiltshire. The 
Saxons were panic-stricken, and many fled over seas, 
whilst Alfred, with his body-guard, took refuge in the 
marshes of the Parret and entrenched himself, as in 
early days the Danes used to do, at Athelney in Som- 
ersetshire. Issuing from his stronghold, the King 
massed the levies of Somerset, Wilts, and Hampshire, 
and in the decisive battle of Eddington he overthrew 
the Danes with great slaughter, and drove them to 
their base at Chippenham. Here they were besieged 
and surrendered at discretion. Guthrum and thirty 
of his chiefs consented to be baptized. He took the 
name of Athelstan : they swore fealty to Alfred, and 
consented to withdraw to East Anglia and settle down 
in Norfolk and Suffolk. This Treaty of Wedmore in 
878 was the foundation of Alfred's new settlement of 
England. It was a momentous date : the civilisation, 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 53 

compound races, unity, and peace of our island all take 
their origin from this settlement, which was as states- 
manlike in conception as it was magnanimous in spirit. 

Alfred was now twenty-nine, and he had been King 
just seven years. He was already the darling of his 
people and the founder of our nation. He had now 
learned all the tactics of the Vikings, and he could beat 
them at their own manoeuvres. He now possessed 
sea power, and could meet them before they reached 
our shores ; and he used the years of peace to organise 
a navy far superior to theirs. Resisting the strong 
temptation to exterminate the heathen invaders whom 
he had beaten in a dozen fights, he induced them to 
make peace on advantageous terms, to become Chris- 
tian, to settle down on the land and take to fixed and 
civilised life instead of piracy and war, and he con- 
sented to their retaining the east and east centre of the 
kingdom north of Thames, out of which, indeed, they 
had driven Mercians and Anglians. Guthrum's East 
Anglia became a Christian " buffer-state " between the 
Vikings and Wessex ; and it has proved the nucleus 
of one of the stoutest and most important races in the 
complex history of Great Britain. 

Alfred now set to work with all the energy of his 
soul, and the insight of consummate genius to take 
care that the new and settled Danish race should not 
be disturbed or perverted by fresh heathen invaders. 
He laboured to develop his fleet, taking command of 
his ships in person, and he devised a new type of 
cruiser, — " long ships nigh twice as long as those 



54 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

of the Danes, with sixty oars or more, steadier and 
swifter, as well as higher out of the water, on a design 
of his own, quite unlike that of Frisians or Danes." In 
one summer with his new warships he destroyed more 
than twenty Viking ships along the southern coast. 

But he saw the need for fortresses on land as well 
as for a navy at sea. He built a system of strong 
places, fencing in the towns and raising stockades at 
spots in the country. He rebuilt London by restor- 
ing the old Roman walls and filling it with a new 
colony of warlike settlers. It thus formed a post 
north of Thames which commanded the approach to 
Essex and East Anglia, as Calais in the fifteenth cen- 
tury commanded the entrance into France. Alfred had 
many wars in the last twenty years of his reign, but 
their whole character and strategy is altered. The 
invaders are continually stopped and dispersed at sea; 
they never capture any important town ; they are 
never able to post themselves firmly and occupy a 
district. They are in the true sense (not in the 
British official sense) " marauders " ; and they are 
driven backwards and forwards from Thames to the 
Exe, from Chester to Essex before the eagle swoop 
of the unwearied and invincible King. Alfred's most 
brilliant campaign, fought all across England, is diffi- 
cult indeed to explain, by reason of its rapid changes 
and great area. It was that which ended in 896, in 
the forty-seventh year of his life and the twenty-fifth 
of his reign. 

Along with his system of fortifications, Alfred re- 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 55 

organised the militia of the kingdom, dividing it into 
a stationary or garrison part, and a mobilised and cam- 
paigning part. It was a rude anticipation of the feu- 
dal system of defensive war. At his accession the 
gallant Saxons had been a mere crowd of half-armed 
countrymen. In ten or fifteen years of war and of 
military organisation, Alfred had created the nucleus 
of a regular army, with adequate fortified bases, and 
something like a knighthood or chivalry, a rudimen- 
tary feudal militia. With this, in the later part of his 
reign, his campaigns are a series of decisive blows, 
his battles are crushing defeats of the enemy, and his 
command of the field is triumphant at every point. 
One of his most brilliant feats was capturing without 
ships a Danish fleet which had pushed up the river 
Lea. He barred the river, defended its banks with 
stockades, and forced the Vikings to escape by land, 
leaving behind them their ships. Since the capture 
of British ships by French cavalry on the ice in the 
great war, there has seldom been so singular an 
exploit. In fact during the later life of the King the 
Norsemen hardly ventured to trouble our island. 
They turned aside to Flanders, Normandy, and the 
coasts of the Continent. 

" For the last four years of his life," says Professor Oman, 
" Alfred was undisturbed save by trifling raids of small 
squadrons, which he brushed off with ease by means of the 
new fleet of ' great ships ' which he had built. The work of 
defence was done : Wessex was saved, and with Wessex the 



56 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

English nationality. In a few years the King's gallant son, 
Edward the Elder, was to take the offensive against the old 
enemy, and to repay on the Danelagh all the evils that 
England had suffered during the miserable years of the ninth 
century. That such triumphs lay within his power was 
absolutely and entirely the work of his great father, who had 
turned defeat into victory, brought order out of chaos, and left 
the torn and riven kingdom that he had inherited transformed 
into the best organised and most powerful state in Western 
Europe." 

Is Alfred " a myth " now, I ask. It is true that 
some of the details of these campaigns are doubtful ; 
not a few are obscure to explain. But the whole of 
the points which I have briefly summarised are cer- 
tain and clear. They may dispute which Merton is 
meant, what Eddington now is, and why Alfred was 
beaten so soon after the battle of Ashdown. But all 
these things are unimportant. The essential facts are 
plain ; they are certain. And they are enough to 
raise Alfred as warrior to the same level as Henry V, 
or Cromwell, or Marlborough, — aye, almost as sea- 
man to the level of Blake and Nelson, for he grasped 
the idea of sea power and realised its decisive effects. 
And they raise him as statesman and founder of 
nations to the level of the Conqueror, and Edward I, 
or the Protector. They recast our nation. Alfred 
was its original creator. 

Turn to his achievements as king. When he came 
to the throne at twenty-two, having seen the death of 
his father and his three brothers within thirteen years, 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 57 

it was the darkest hour of the West Saxons. North- 
umbria, Mercia, East Anglia, and parts of Wessex 
had been desolated ; the abbeys sacked ; schools, 
churches, homesteads in ruins. Northern, Central, and 
Eastern England was in possession of the Danes, and 
Wessex lay at their mercy ; " the people submitted 
to them, save King Alfred, — he with a little band 
withdrew into the woods and swamps." It was the 
gravest crisis to which England ever was exposed, for 
conquest by the ferocious pagans would have meant 
the postponement of British civilisation for ages. 
Once established in our island, the Danes would have 
been the scourge of Northern Europe. From this 
supreme disaster Alfred — and he alone — saved 
England, preserved Europe. 

No sooner had he settled Guthrum and his host at 
East Anglia, which secured the incorporation of a 
Norseman race with the Saxon and with England, 
than Alfred set to work to restore his desolated land. 
His treasury was empty, his towns were in ruins, civil 
government was paralysed. He built churches, ab- 
beys, schools ; he repeopled waste districts. He re- 
organised justice, making the judges the ministers of 
the sovereign, and subject to his final appeal. As 
legislator he recast and fused the Saxon, Anglian, and 
Kentish laws or " dooms," so that unity of civil law 
stimulated the fusion of central, eastern, and southern 
Anglo-Saxons. His system of laws, of which we have 
authentic records, which a learned German, Dr. Lieber- 
mann, has now edited with scholarly precision, is a 



58 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

model of wise, cautious, and broad legal reform. He 
is full of anxiety not to make abrupt innovation, to 
impose nothing strange or unwelcome, and to enact 
no command which could not be maintained by public 
opinion. 

The restoration of London was a stroke of profound 
statecraft. By it he blocked the raids of the Norse- 
men up the Thames, by which they had been wont to 
penetrate into Surrey, Middlesex, and Berkshire. By 
it he obtained an impregnable fortress, north of Thames, 
by which he could control East Anglia. How little 
could he foresee what London was to become a thou- 
sand years after his time. Perhaps he might have 
doubted if he was wise, could he now return to earth 
to see all that this huge agglomeration of buildings 
has become. But the restoration of the ancient city, 
which the Roman historian describes as " especially 
famous for the crowd of its merchants and their 
wares " — the city which in Alfred's day counted 
nearly a thousand years of continuous life, but which 
had lain desolate for thirty-five years since its destruc- 
tion by the Norsemen about the time of Alfred's 
birth — the city which now counts nearly two thou- 
sand years of existence, and is now the vastest accumu- 
lation of men that has ever been recorded in authentic 
history — the restoration of London, I say, destined 
to be the barrier of the Danes and the gateway into 
Mercia, and finally the emporium of the world, was 
the master-stroke of a great far-seeing genius. 

He showed himself in the rest of his policy the 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 59 

same far-sighted and organising creator of a new 
nation. The Christianised Danes of East Anglia 
soon learned to look with admiration and awe on his 
power. Alfred in the second half of his reign ruled 
over a compact state reaching from the Channel up 
into Southwestern England as far as Lancashire, 
with fortresses along the Thames, along the rivers of 
the west, and up to Chester on the north. English 
Mercia which he created and which was so admirably 
ruled by his able daughter Ethelfleda and her hus- 
band, Ethelred, formed a new buffer-state between 
the Danes of the Danelagh in East Anglia and the 
Britons of Cornwall and Wales. Alfred made no 
attempt formally to annex either Cornwall, or Wales, 
or East Anglia, or Northumbria. But his paramount 
influence over all was felt, and they recognised the 
supreme influence of the organic, civilised, progressive 
kingdom of Wessex. Alfred created for his descend- 
ants a united England not by conquest, not by fraud 
— but by wisdom, justice, and moral greatness. 

But the genius and serene humanity of Alfred was 
not content with our little island. He was European, 
Catholic, imperial, in the highest and purest meaning 
of these words. In truth, he recognised that the 
petty island of which he was the predominant chief 
needed to be sustained and vivified by the larger and 
more ancient culture of Southern Europe and even of 
the East. He who had been a boy at Rome, hallowed 
by the hand of the great Pope Leo IV, he who had 
crossed Europe twice, and had been at the Court of 



60 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

the Frank king, the great grand-daughter of Charle- 
magne becoming his step-mother, used every means 
to connect our island with the culture of the Continent. 
He brought over learned men from France and Ger- 
many ; he sent constant missions and tribute to Rome ; 
he sent bold navigators to the North Cape and the 
Baltic ; he was in communication with the Patriarch 
of Jerusalem, and the better opinion is that he sent a 
mission to the Christian churches in India. East and 
West were filled with a profound impression of the 
lofty and religious enthusiasm of the West-Saxon king 
— the new Charlemagne of Britain who dreamed of an 
intellectual commerce between the ancient world and 
the new world, between the East and the West. This 
was to be a true imperialist — to found a world-wide 
empire of sympathy, knowledge, and ideas — not one 
of bloodshed, domination, and ruin. 

Alfred's energy and culture seem to have been 
of that general and encyclopaedic kind which marks 
only the greatest and rarest of mankind. War, hunt- 
ing, poetry, music, literature, architecture, mechanics, 
geography, law, prayer, and ceremonial seem alike to 
have employed his interests. He built churches, 
courts, schools, monasteries for men and for women ; 
he designed ships, lamps to read by, and machines to 
record the time. Only the other day at Oxford I had 
in my hand the very copy of the Pastoral Care which 
he sent to Worcester Cathedral, for he tells us he had 
one sent to each diocese in his kingdom ; and I 
handled that curious and perfect remnant of his per- 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 6 1 

sonal effects — the Jewel, which, with enamel work 
and delicate gold filigree, bears the inscription — Al- 
fred had me worked. The precise form of his build- 
ings we know not. It is doubtful if a single stone of 
his actual construction remains, at least not any that 
is visible to-day. But the traditions, anecdotes, and 
things ascribed to the King, even if we can trust few 
particulars of them, exactly testify to the general belief 
in his extraordinary range of interest. Alfred lived in 
an age of very few books, of most meagre learning 
and of rudimentary simplicity of life — an age when 
a man of consummate genius and of inexhaustible 
energy could master almost everything of value that 
was to be known, and almost everything essential that 
had to be made or done. I doubt if recorded history 
tells of any men who in range of interest and variety 
of power were quite the equals of Alfred, unless it be 
Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Charles the Great, and 
perhaps Bonaparte. And if Julius, Alexander, and 
Bonaparte greatly surpassed Alfred in scientific ac- 
quirements, they were immeasurably inferior to him 
in grace of nature and beauty of soul. And if the 
mighty Charles towered above Alfred in force and in 
breadth of space, he could not compare with the West- 
Saxon saint in exquisite purity or in spiritual eleva- 
tion. Alfred, it is truly said, was the only perfect 
man of action in the annals of mankind. 

It is in his own writings that we know the true 
Alfred best. Julius and Bonaparte have left us memoirs 
of themselves more ample than Alfred's ; but neither 



62 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

of them open to us their own souls with such candour 
and truth. The authentic writings of our King are 
ample to shew us how he looked on the world, on his 
duty, on his aspirations, and on his Creator. No man 
has left us his thoughts with such entire openness of 
heart, if it be not St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, 
Marcus Aurelius, or King David. The so-called 
Boethius of Alfred, one third of which are his own 
original meditations, is as beautiful in expression as 
it is noble in thought. It is certain that these are the 
genuine words of the royal saint. And neither ancient 
moralist nor scriptural homily has ever exceeded them 
in dignity and elevation. Listen to these words : — 

" Power is never a good thing save its possessor be good ; 
for when power is beneficent, this is due to the man who 
wields it. Therefore it is that a man never by his authority 
attains to virtue and excellence, but by reason of his virtue 
and excellence he attains to authority and power. No man 
is better for his power, but for his skill he is good, if he is 
good, and for his skill he is worthy of power, if he is worthy 
of it. Study Wisdom then, and when ye have learned it, 
contemn it not, for I tell you that by its means ye may with- 
out fail attain to power, yea, even though not desiring it. 
Ye need not take thought for power nor endeavour after it ; 
for if ye are only wise and good, it will follow you, even 
though ye seek it not. Tell me now, O Mind, what is the 
height of thy desire in wealth and power ? Is it not this 
present life and the perishable wealth that we before spoke 
of? O ye foolish men, do ye know what riches are, and 
power, and worldly weal ? They are your lords and rulers, 
not ye theirs." 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 63 

This is how the King understands his own royal office. 
He says : — 

" O Philosophy, thou knowest that I never greatly delighted 
in the possession of earthly power, nor longed for this author- 
ity, but I desired instruments and materials to carry out the 
work I was set to do, which was that I should virtuously and 
fittingly administer the authority committed to me. Now, no 
man, as thou knowest, can get full play for his natural gifts, 
nor conduct and administer government, unless he hath fit 
tools, and the raw material to work upon. By material I 
mean that which is necessary to the exercise of natural 
powers ; thus a king's raw material and instruments of rule 
are a well-peopled land, and he must have men of prayer, 
men of war, and men of work. As thou knowest, without 
these tools no king may display his special talent. ... I 
have desired material for the exercise of government that my 
talents and my power might not be forgotten, for every good 
gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard 
of, if Wisdom be not in them. Without Wisdom no faculty 
can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can 
never be accounted as skill. To sum up all, I may say that 
it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was 
alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come 
after me my memory in good works." 

That memory in good works of the Saxon hero has 
now lasted a thousand years after his death ; and is 
more definite, more inspiring, more sacred to us to-day 
than it has ever been in the ten centuries through 
which it has survived. Shall we, the hundred millions 
on both sides of the Atlantic who speak the tongue 



64 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

that Alfred spoke, who are of the same blood and 
kindred, suffer to fade away the memory of one who 
was the noblest type of our race and traditions. In 
this age of Progress and of never-ending pursuit of 
new things, new men, new ideas, we feel ever more 
and more in the bottom of our minds, the need to 
base these on just traditions of the Past. Ours is the 
age of Progress; but it is also the age of History, 
and of due commemoration of all that in the Past 
has been surest, purest, and best. Ours is an age of 
Hero-worship in the true and wise sense of the term, 
the reverent honour of our real teachers, founders, and 
chiefs. To a nation the quality of its Ideals are every- 
thing — the Ideals are more vital to a people than 
they are to a man ; for he has personal and individual 
models before him from his youth. By Ideals I mean 
that which a people admires and seeks to imitate, to 
reproduce, to follow. 

The intellectual, spiritual, scientific heroes of our 
nation and race receive, as it is, abundant honour and 
consideration. The Shakespeares and Miltons, the 
Newtons and the Darwins, the Gregorys and the Ber- 
nards are amply remembered. But the kings, warriors, 
and statesmen too often bring divisions of nation, 
creed, and school of opinion. The Richelieus and 
the Cromwells, the Fredericks and the Bonapartes, 
even the Turgots and the Washingtons have left some 
memories of strife and defeat behind them. There is 
hardly in all modern history a name which does not 
rouse some embers of passion in one or other quarter 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 65 

of those who suffered at the hand of the soldier or 
the ruler. The name of Alfred can awaken no mem- 
ory but one of gratitude and affection. It is bound 
up with no struggle of Protestant against Catholic, or 
of Celt against Saxon, of people against king, of 
reformer against reactionist, of rich against poor, 
of weak against the strong. His memory is one 
record of unsullied beneficence, of piety without super- 
stition, of valour without cruelty, of government with- 
out oppression. 

Without hyperbole, without boasting, we may say 
that it is the most ancient, the most continuous, the 
most definite memory in all Christian history. If 
that of the Catholic church and of its founders and 
chiefs is more ancient and also more extended, it is 
the memory of an institution and its influence and 
effects are less locally defined. If the memory of 
Charlemagne is grander and more diffused, the se- 
quence of his authority is more broken and dispersed. 
But the unbroken effect of Alfred's life and work can 
be traced with precision over a thousand years, and 
for another thousand years, we may predict, it will 
continue to flourish and enlarge. 

How vast is this antiquity of tradition compared 
with anything in modern history. It is but two years 
ago that the great Republic of the West celebrated 
the first centenary of their immortal founder's death — 
George Washington. The French Republic celebrated 
its first centenary just twelve years ago. The king- 
dom of Italy is forty years old. The German Empire 



66 THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 

is thirty years old ; and it has just been celebrating 
the second centenary of the kingdom of Prussia in 
1 70 1. The second centenary ! Why ! Alfred, at 
his birth, had a royal descent from kings of the West- 
Saxons of nearly four centuries ; and we now count 
ten centuries more since his death. The blood of 
Alfred has descended from generation to generation in 
thirty-three degrees down to King Edward the Seventh, 
who can trace his ancestry and his throne in a long 
succession of nearly fourteen centuries up to the first 
Saxon conquerors of our island. I set as little store 
as Alfred himself by mere antiquity of birth — (high 
birth is of the mind, he says, not of the flesh) — nor 
do I rate extravagantly mere effluxion of time. But 
the historic imagination confers a halo on exalted 
virtue and genius when it finds it charged with tre- 
mendous responsibilities and tasks, when it is mellowed 
by the veil of a venerable antiquity of age. 

The thousandth year of such a memory ought not 
to pass without a commemoration worthy of such a 
name. Of the walls which he raised, the halls wherein 
he dwelt, the churches and the towers that he built, 
it is difficult to-day to trace more than a few stones. 
His tomb even was twice removed, and at last was 
laid in a new abbey some distance from the spot 
where his people laid it. We have sought sorrowing 
the place where our hero was laid. In the last cen- 
tury the very spot where his coffin was placed could 
have been identified. But rather more than a hundred 
years ago the very foundations of Hyde Abbey were 



THE MILLENARY OF KING ALFRED 67 

removed. And to-day no man can tell us where the 
dust of the noblest of Englishmen was scattered. I 
have searched the spot in vain, though I believe that 
the very acre of ground in which that sacred dust 
still rests can still with certainty be traced. But Win- 
chester, the home and capital of the hero-king of 
Wessex, will not forget him. And in a few months 
the grandest colossal statue in our country will be set 
up hard by the foundation of his castle and his church ; 
and it will bear witness for ages to come that English- 
men have not yet forgotten the founder of their 
national greatness and the noblest soul that England 
ever bore. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

d. 901 



The Writings of King Alfred 

(Died 901) 

Address given at Harvard College, Mass., March, 1901 

In the great days of antique culture, when the 
citizen of Athens, coming from the Academus or 
the Stoa, found himself in the Museum of Alexandria, 
or in the schools of Syracuse, Magna Graecia, Asia 
Minor, or Tyre, he felt that he was still in his own 
country, both intellectually and morally, whatever 
might be the state or nation to which he had trav- 
elled. He and his guests spoke but one language, 
shared the same civilisation, and had in common the 
same immortal literature. 

And now, a son of Oxford or Cambridge in the old 
island feels himself at home, amongst his own people 
and fellow-students, when he is welcomed at Harvard 
of the new continent. We all have but one language, 
the tongue now spoken by 130,000,000 of civilised 
men ; and we have the same literature, the noblest 
literature of the modern world. And so, when I was 
honoured with the invitation to address you, I be- 
thought me I would speak to you of the rise of that 
literature which is our common heritage, which more 
than race, or institutions, or manners and habits, makes 
us all one — which is far the richest, the most con- 
b 71 



72 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

tinuous, the most virile evolution of human genius 
in the records of Christendom. 

I call to mind also that this year is the millenary 
or thousandth anniversary of the death, in 901, of 
Alfred the West Saxon King, 1 who is undoubtedly 
the founder of a regular prose literature, as of so many 
other English institutions and ways. Could there be 
a fitter theme for an English man of letters in an 
American seat of learning ? There was nothing in- 
sular about Alfred ; he was not British ; he was not 
feudal ; his memory is not stained by any crime done in 
the struggles of nation, politics, or religion. He lived 
ages before " Great Britain " was invented, mainly, I 
believe, in order to humour our Scotch brother-citizens ; 
ages before Protestantism divided Christendom ; ages 
before kingship ceased to be useful and republics began 
to be normal. Alfred was never King of England : 
he lived and died King of the West Saxons, the ances- 
tral head of a Saxon clan. He and his people were 
just as much your ancestors as they were mine, for 
all we can say is, that the 130,000,000 who speak our 
Anglo-Saxon tongue have all a fairly equal claim to 
look on him as the heroic leader of our remote fore- 
fathers. 2 



1 The year 901 is accepted by historians as the date of Alfred's death. Recent 
research by competent paleographers has made it more probable that he died in 899 or 
900. See articles and letters in the English Historical Review, Athenceum, etc. 
The Millenary Commemoration Committee decided not to enter on the debated prob- 
lem, but to adhere to the date generally recognised when the committee was formed. 

2 A large representative committee, of which the King is patron, was formed in 
1898 to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Alfred's death. A grand colos- 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 73 

But I wish now to speak of Alfred not as our father 
in blood, or in nation, but as the real father of native 
prose, that common inheritance of us all, which, after 
a thousand years of fertility, has lost none of its vigour, 
its purity, and its wealth. The thousandth anniver- 
sary of his death has aroused new attention to his 
work, and has produced some important books to 
which I will direct your notice. Of Alfred the man, 
the warrior, the statesman, the hero, the saint, I will 
not now speak. In each of these characters he was 
perfect, — the purest, grandest, most heroic soul that 
ever sprang from our race. It is only of Alfred the 
writer of books, the creator of Saxon prose, that I 
wish to speak. He was indeed one of those rare 
rulers of men who trust to the book as much as to 
the sword, who value the school more than the court, 
who believe in no force but the force of thought and 
of truth. 

In that noble and pathetic preface to his Pastoral 
Care, Alfred himself has told us how and why he 
carried through the restoration of learning in his 
church and people. When the first long struggle 
with the Danes was over, he found his kingdom 
desolate, and ignorance universal. There was not one, 
he says, on this side of Humber who could understand 
their mass-book or put a letter from Latin into Eng- 



sal statue by Mr. Hamo Thorneycroft, R. A., is now being raised at Winchester, where 
he lived and died, by British and American subscribers. The Hon. Secretary' of the 
English committee is Mr. Alfred Bowker, Mayor of Winchester. The Hon. Treasurer 
is Lord Avebury, of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., Lombard Street, London. 



74 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

lish. He groaned to think how learning had flourished 
before the great invasion. He wondered how the 
good and wise men of old had omitted to translate 
their Latin books into English, so that the people 
might read them and hear them read. He supposes 
they could not believe that learning would die down so 
utterly. And so the great King set himself to work 
with all the fire of one who was both hero and genius 
to the twofold task, first, to restore learning and found a 
national education, and secondly to put the great books 
of the world into the mother-tongue of his people. 
For the first, he gathered round him scholars from all 
parts, without distinction of country or race, Welsh, 
Celts, Mercians, Flemings, Westphalians, as well as men 
of Wessex and Kent. The second task he undertook 
himself. Having mastered Latin late in manhood 
after strenuous toil, he became the first of translators, 
and in so doing he founded a prose literature. 

As a boy, Alfred had shown his zest for study. He 
had been taken to Rome and to the Court of the 
Frank King. 1 But from the age of eighteen he was 
occupied for twenty years with desperate wars and 
the reorganisation of his kingdom. It was not until 
he had been king sixteen years, and was thirty- 
eight years old, that he found himself free for literary 
work. That he did all this, as he tells us with stately 

1 I incline to think that when Ethelwulf sent the boy to Rome at the age of four, 
Alfred remained there for perhaps over two years till his father brought him back ; and, 
though he did not learn to read, his childish mind was filled with what he there heard 
of antiquity and of the Christian world. The fact that his name appears in charters 
when he was five does not convince me. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED J$ 

pathos, "in the various and manifold worldly cares 
that oft troubled him both in mind and in body," is 
to me one of the most mysterious tales of intellectual 
passion in the history of human thought. It places 
him in the rare rank of those warriors and rulers who, 
amidst all the battle of their lives, have left the world 
imperishable works of their own composition, such as 
did David, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Aurelius. 1 

The works of Alfred are numerous, important, and 
admirably chosen. 2 His Handbook — a sort of antho- 
logy or golden treasury of fine thoughts which he col- 
lected whilst Asser was reading to him and teaching 
him to translate — has utterly perished, though Will- 
iam of Malmesbury, two centuries later, used and cited 
it. Ah ! how many libraries of volumes would we will- 
ingly lose to-day if time would give up to us from its 
Lethean maw that well-thumbed book, " about the size 
of a Psalter," that the holy king was wont to keep in 
his bosom : the book wherein from day to day he noted 
down in English some great thought that had im- 
pressed him in his studies. 



1 See Pauli. Life of Alfred the Great, 1 85 1, translated by B. Thorpe, Bohn's 
Ecclesiastical Library, 1857, with text and translation of the Orosius ; also the Jubilee 
Edition of Alfred's Works, 1852-18 5 3. The latest account of Alfred's career as 
king, warrior, lawgiver, scholar, and author is to be found in the volume published by 
the Alfred Commemoration Committee. Alfred the Great (Adam and Charles Black), 
London, 1899. 8vo. 

2 For the writings of King Alfred, consult the work just referred to and the essays 
therein of the Bishop of Bristol, and Rev. Professor Earle ; also see Mr. Stopford 
Brooke's English Literature to the Norman Conquest. Macmillan & Co., 1 898. 8vo. 
Chapter xiv, and R. P. Wiilker's Grundriss sur Geschichte der Angelsacbsischen Lit- 
teratur. 



j6 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

After his personal Handbook of thoughts came Al- 
fred's Laws, 1 which we possess intact in several ver- 
sions. This book for literary purposes is interesting 
only by its preface, evidently dictated by the King him- 
self. Here we have in a sentence that spirit of order, 
of simplicity, of modesty, of self-control, of respect for 
public opinion, of reverence for the past time, and of 
solemn consideration of the times to come, which 
stamps the whole career of Alfred as ruler. 

" I, Alfred the King, gathered these laws together and 
ordered many to be written which our forefathers held, such 
as I approved ; and many which I approved not I rejected, 
and had other ordinances enacted with the counsel of my 
Witan ; for I dared not venture to set much of my own upon 
the Statute-book, for I knew not what might be approved by 
those who should come after us. But such ordinances as I 
found, either in the time of my kinsman Ina, or of Offa, King 
of the Mercians, or of Ethelberht, who first received baptism 
in England — such as seemed to me rightest I have collected 
here, and the rest I have let drop. I, then, Alfred, King of the 
West Saxons, showed these laws to all my Witan, and they 
then said that they all approved of them as proper to be holden." 

There spoke the soul of the true conservative, moder- 
ate, and far-seeing chief of a free people, a creator of 
states, such as were Solon and Servius in antiquity ; 
such as were, in later days, some adored chief of a free 
people, a William the Silent, or a George Washington. 
The books of which Alfred is certainly and strictly 

1 Dr. Felix Liebermann's Gesetze der Angelsacbsen, 1898, etc. 4to. The latest 
critical edition of the Saxon laws j also see the essay, in the joint volume, by Professor 
Sir Frederick Pollock. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 



77 



the author are five in number ; all translations or adap- 
tations from the Latin, and all typical works of standard 
authority. They were evidently selected with a broad 
and discerning judgment. Alfred's mind was essen- 
tially historic and cosmopolitan. So he began with 
the standard text-book of general history, the work 
of St. Augustine's disciple and colleague, Orosius, of 
the fifth century. Alfred again was preeminently the 
patriot — the parens ■patriae. And accordingly he chose 
the History of the Church in England, or rather the 
Christian history of the Anglo-Saxon federation, by 
the Venerable Bede, to give his people the annals of 
their own ancestors. Alfred again felt a prime need 
of restoring the church in knowledge and in zeal. 
And so he translated the famous Pastoral Care of 
Gregory the Great — the accepted manual for training 
to the priestly office. A second work of Pope Greg- 
ory which he translated was the 'Dialogues, a collection 
of popular tales. Lastly, came the translation, para- 
phrase, or recasting of Boethius's Consolation of Phi- 
losophy — far the most original and important of all 
Alfred's writings. He thus provided (i) a history of 
the world, (2) a history of his own country, (3) a text- 
book of education of the priesthood, (4) a people's 
story book, (5) moral and religious meditations. I 
will speak of each of these, but principally of the last, 
the Boethius, which, by its originality and its beauty, 
gives us far the truest insight into the inner faith and 
the literary genius of the King. 

There were some other works in which his impulse 



78 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

is seen, but where his actual hand is not certainly to 
be proved. First and foremost comes the Saxon 
Chronicle? the most authentic and important record of 
its youth which any modern nation possesses. Dur- 
ing the active life of Alfred this yearly record of events 
is undoubtedly of contemporaneous authorship ; and 
for the most important years of Alfred's reign it is very 
full and keenly interesting. The evidence is conclusive 
that the King gave the most powerful stimulus to the 
compilation of the record, and thus was the founder 
of a systematic history of our country ; for we may 
truly say that no error of the least importance has ever 
been proven against the Chronicle, which is properly 
regarded as the touchstone of historic veracity to which 
all other annals are submitted. It is to my judgment 
clear that the history of the wars with the Danes as 
told in the Chronicle was prepared under the personal 
direction of the chief himself, if it was not actually 
dictated by his lips. 

The King is said to have begun a translation of the 
Psalms of David, which was cut short by his death ; 
but of these we have no known copy. The Soliloquies 
of St. Augustine 2 is of his age, and has been imputed 
to his authorship. I incline to the belief that the 
preface is his own work, and that he superintended, if 
he did not execute, the translation. The same may 



1 Saxon Chronicle. Text of all manuscripts and translation by B. Thorpe. Rolls 
Series, 1861. 

2 Soliloquies of St. Augustine. Text in The Shrine, by Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne, 
1864-1870. 8vo. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 79 

be the truth of the Book of Martyrs. 1 Lastly, there 
is the King's Testament, which, though highly interest- 
ing, is hardly a literary composition. No one accepts 
the authenticity of the Proverbs of Alfred, composed 
some centuries later, nor do we attribute to him the 
translation of the Fables of ALsop, nor the treatise on 
Falconry. But these and some other works that 
are ascribed to him testify to the belief of ages long 
after his death that his literary activity was of wide 
range and of permanent value. 

After studying the arguments of the Anglo-Saxon 
scholars about the order of time in the composition 
of these works, I incline to the view of Mr. Stopford 
Brooke in his History of English Literature to the 
Norman Conquest, i8<^8. He makes the order this, — 
the Pastoral Care, the Bede, the Orosius, and lastly the 
Boethius. This, at least, is the order I shall adopt ; 
and it certainly lends itself best to the literary estimate. 
Most authorities put the Boethius earlier. But we 
must not rely too exclusively on paleography and dia- 
lectic variations in this matter. Paleographists and 
the dialect experts wage incessantly their own civil 
wars, and I am not always ready to swear fealty to 
the victor or the survivor of the hour. 2 A consen- 
sus of paleographists and experts in dialect is conclu- 
sive, or conclusive as far as it goes. But until we know 
all the circumstances under which a given manuscript 
was written, I am not prepared to surrender my own 

1 Book of Martyrs. Text in The Shrine. 

2 Wiilker {op. cit. ) gives a table of these differences amongst the editors. 



80 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

common sense. There is a historical and a literary 
flair in these things, which ought not to be lightly 
distrusted, unless contradicted by indisputable written 
proof. We have no reason to suppose that Alfred 
wrote much, or even at all, with his own hand. Most 
great men of action dictate, and do not hold the pen. 
And the fact that a given manuscript has traces of a 
Mercian or a Northumbrian dialect is no sufficient 
proof that it could not be Alfred's work, unless we 
can prove that no Mercian, no Northumbrian, ever 
copied a book which Alfred had dictated, composed, 
or directed to be written. 

The naif and pathetic preface to the Pastoral Care 1 
of Pope Gregory the Great is unquestionably the 
King's own work, and is a touching revelation of his 
intense love for his native land and his passion to 
give his people a higher education. I cannot read 
that simple outpouring of soul by the great reformer 
without seeing the confession that it was a most urgent 
task, and his own first attempt at translating ; and thus 
I judge it to come next after his Handbook and his 
Laws. It was natural that a great and systematic 
restorer of learning should begin with the training of 
those who were to teach. And thus Alfred's first 
great literary work was the translation of the standard 
manual for the education of the clergy and of other 
scholars. He would often meditate, he says, what 
wise men, what happy times there were of old in 

1 Cura Pastora/is. Text and translation, edited by H. Sweet. Early English Text 
Society, 1 8 71. 8vo. For the preface, see Stopford Brooke, op. cit., p. 24. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 8 1 

England, how kings preserved peace, morality, and 
order at home, and enlarged their borders without, 
how foreigners came to the land in search of wisdom 
and instruction. Now, he groans out, all is changed, 
and in these days of war and distress hardly a man 
could read a Latin book. And yet, he adds, what 
punishments would come upon us if we neither loved 
wisdom nor suffered other men to obtain it: we should 
love the name only of Christian, and very few of the 
virtues. Then he goes on to speak of the ravages 
and burnings of the Danes, how the few books left 
were in Latin, and how few Englishmen could read 
that tongue. "Therefore," he says, "it seems better 
to me to translate some books, which are most needful 
for all men to know, into the language which we can 
all understand. And this I would have you do, if 
we can preserve peace, to set all the youth now in Eng- 
land of free men, whose circumstances enable them 
to devote themselves to it, to learn as long as they 
are not old enough for other occupations, until they 
are well able to read English writing." Here was a 
scheme of primary education for the people, education 
which was not made effective in our country until my 
own lifetime. And then he goes on to the higher 
education, ordaining that " those be afterwards taught 
more in the Latin language who are to continue learn- 
ing and be promoted to a higher rank." Next, he 
tells us how he began "among other various and 
manifold troubles of this kingdom to translate into 
English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, 



82 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

and in English Shepherd's Book, sometimes word for 
word, and sometimes according to the sense, as I had 
learnt it from Plegmund, my Archbishop, and Asser, 
my bishop, and Grimbold, my mass-priest, and John, 
my mass-priest. And when I had learnt it, as I could 
best understand it, and as I could most clearly interpret 
it, I translated it into English; and I will send a copy 
to every bishopric in my kingdom." 

Here, then, is a great ruler, more than a thousand 
years ago, when the area and population of his own 
country were far below those of a state of the Union, 
when their very existence was at stake, and they were 
surrounded by ferocious invaders, who designs a scheme 
for primary and superior education, and restores the 
church and the schools. Here is the man who began, 
and certainly had he been longer lived and enjoyed 
peace, might have carried through, the translation of 
the Bible, seven centuries before it was actually accom- 
plished. There is a most fascinating relic connected with 
this very work. The Bodleian Library at Oxford pos- 
sesses the very copy which the King sent to Worces- 
ter. It is inscribed ©eos Boc Sceal To Wiogara 
Ceastre, i.e. This book shall (go) to Worcester. 1 I 
saw it when I was last in Oxford. And when I took 
in my own hands the very copy of his toil which Al- 
fred a thousand years ago sent with his greeting to his 
Bishop at Worcester, which he solemnly commanded 
in the name of God no man should remove from the 
Minster ; when I held in my hand in the Ashmolean 

1 Bodleian Library. Manuscripts. Harton, 20. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 83 

Museum 1 the very jewel which the King had made 
for himself (perhaps to bear upon his sceptre) inscribed, 
— JElfred had me worked, — I felt something of that 
thrill which men of old felt when they kissed a frag- 
ment of the true cross, or which the Romans felt when 
they saluted the Sibylline books. If to-day we fall short 
in the power of mystical imagination, our saner relic- 
worship is founded upon history, scholarship, and jeal- 
ous searching into the minutest footprints of the past. 

Of the Dialogues of Gregory, we need say little, for 
the translation as yet exists only in three manuscripts. 
But I follow the view of Professor Earle, that the book 
is the King's work, as the characteristic preface most 
obviously is. 2 "I, Alfred," it runs, "by the grace of 
God, dignified with the honour of royalty, have under- 
stood and have often heard from reading holy books 
that we to whom God hath given so much eminence 
of worldly distinction, have peculiar need at times to 
humble and subdue our minds to the divine and spir- 
itual law, in the midst of this earthly anxiety:" . . . 
cc that I may now and then contemplate the heavenly 
things in the midst of these earthly troubles." 

In the Pastoral Care the King carefully followed the 
text of the Latin, neither adding nor omitting any- 
thing in a revered book of such authority by the spir- 
itual founder of Saxon Christianity. And in a first 
essay he proceeded with scrupulous attention to his 

1 Now deposited in the Taylor Museum, Oxford, and described in a new work by 
Professor Earle — The Alfred yeiuel, an Historical Essay. 1 90 1. Clarendon Press. 
Cr. 8vo. 2 Professor Earle's essay in joint volume, p, 198. 



84 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

original. As he advanced in scholarship and literary 
skill, he became much more free, until in the Boetbius 
he uses the Latin almost as a text for his own medita- 
tions. In the translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical His- 
tory? Alfred omits many sections, of which he gives a 
list ; but he adds nothing, although there were many 
points as to the history of Wessex wherein he might 
have corrected and supplemented Bede's meagre state- 
ments. The translation keeps fairly well to the origi- 
nal, but it has no special literary value. The next 
translation of the King was the History of the World 
by Orosius, 2 which St. Augustine suggested as a com- 
panion to his own argument, in the City of God, that 
the wars and desolation of the Roman world were not 
caused by the spread of the Gospel. It was the only 
book known in the Middle Ages as a universal his- 
tory, and it was as such that Alfred put it forth. But, 
as his object was essentially to educate, he adds full 
explanations of matters which Saxons would not easily 
follow, and his very elaborate additions on geography, 
the topography of the German peoples, the account of 
the Baltic and Scandinavia by the Norseman, Ohthere, 
have a freshness, a distinctness, and precision which pe- 
culiarly stamp the organising and eager grasp of a born 
explorer, who believed with the Prophet — " many shall 
run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." 

1 Baeda's Ecclesiastical History. Text and modern English, by T. Miller (E. E. 
Text Society), 1 890-1 898. 

2 Orosius. Text and Latin by H. Sweet (E. E. Text Society), and also by Thorpe, 
in Pauli's Life, translated. See Note 1, p. 75. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 85 

We come now to Alfred's Boethius, far the most 
important work of his pen. It is almost an original 
treatise, so great are the variations, additions to, and 
omissions from the Latin text. Whole chapters are 
dropped by the translator, and page after page of new 
thoughts are inserted. Some idea of the extent of this 
paraphrasing may be got, when we find the first twelve 
pages of the Latin compressed into two of Alfred's, 
and nearly the whole of the last book of the Latin, 
occupying fifteen octavo pages, dropped altogether, 
and new matter of the King's, filling nine pages, in- 
serted. Alfred took the Meditations of Boethius as 
a standard text-book of moral and religious thought, 
and he uses it as the basis of his own musings upon 
man, the world, and God. Alfred intends his book 
to be for the edification of his own people. And, ac- 
cordingly, he drops most of the classical philosophy ; 
expands and explains the mythological and poetic allu- 
sions ; and changes the Platonic theism of Boethius 
into Biblical and Christian divinity. The transforma- 
tion is astonishing. As we read the Latin we find it 
difficult to understand why a book so abstract, and in 
places so metaphysical and technical, held the world 
of European culture for a thousand years down to the 
age of Shakespeare. But, when we turn to Alfred's 
piece, we are in the world of those poignant searchings 
of heart which pervade the Psalms of David, the Imi- 
tation of Christ, and the devotional books of Jeremy 
Taylor. 

The millenary commemoration of the King has 



86 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

drawn fresh attention both to Boethius and to Alfred's 
translation, and we may say that it is only in recent 
years that we have had adequate studies of both. Dr. 
Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders and Mr. Stewart's 
excellent volume on Boethius 1 have collected in con- 
venient form almost everything that is known about 
the Roman philosopher. And quite lately Mr. Sedge- 
field, of Melbourne and Cambridge universities, has 
published two books on Alfred's version : the first, 
a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon text from the 
manuscript with a Glossary, the second a version in 
modern English prose, and an alliterative version of the 
metres. 3 Both the text and the modern rendering by 
Mr. Sedgefield are an immense improvement both in 
accuracy, scholarship, and elegance on the earlier edi- 
tions whether of the old or the new versions. And it 
is only now, by Mr. Sedgefield's aid, and with the 
essays by the Bishop of Bristol and Professor Earle 
in the recent volume Alfred the Great, 1899, edited 
by the Hon. Secretary of the Millenary Commemora- 
tion Committee, and with Mr. Stopford Brooke's 
excellent chapter in his book already cited, that the 
real power of Alfred's work can be fully understood 
by the general reader. 

This is not the occasion to enlarge on the story of 

1 Italy and her Invaders, by Dr. T. Hodgkin, second edition, 1896. Vol. Ill, 
chap. xii. Oxford University Press. Boethius. An essay by Hugh Fraser Stewart, 
1891. 8vo. 

2 King Alfred's Old English Version of Boethius de Consolatione Philosophic, by 
Walter J. Sedgefield, Oxford University Press, 1899, and King Alfred's Version of the 
Consolations of Boethius, done into Modern English, by the same. Oxford University 
Press, 1900. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 87 

Boethius himself, or the strange fortune of his famous 
book. Dr. Hodgkin has given good reason to think 
that his political career was not one of such perfect 
loyalty and wisdom. And, if Alfred's introduction and 
zealous defence of him contains, as is probable, the 
church tradition about his life and death, Theodoric 
might fairly regard him as an enemy and a traitor. 
The King tells us that Boethius cast about within 
himself how he might wrest the sovereignty from the 
unrighteous King of the Goths, and that he sent word 
privily to the Caesar at Constantinople to help the 
Romans back to their Christian faith and their old laws. 

If Theodoric had grounds to believe that Boethius 
was really taking part in a conspiracy to urge the 
Eastern emperor to do what, in the next generation, 
Justinian did when he destroyed the Gothic kingdom 
in Italy, he would naturally treat the great Roman 
chief of the senate as a conspirator. It is not so im- 
probable that the story, which Alfred may have heard 
at Rome itself not more than three hundred years 
after the fall of the Gothic kingdom, and which he 
treats as ample justification of Boethius, was the true 
story, or, if greatly exaggerated, still having a substantial 
basis in fact. If so, Theodoric did not suddenly be- 
come a ferocious tyrant ; and St. Severinus, as Boe- 
thius was called in the church, lost his life and liberty 
in an abortive and very dangerous clerical conspiracy 
to destroy the Goths and restore Italy to the Greek 
empire. 

But the special point to which I wish to call your 



88 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

attention is the literary beauty of Alfred's own work. 
I estimate that about one-quarter of the whole book 
is original matter and not translation. There are 
seldom two consecutive pages in which new matter does 
not occur ; and there are nine consecutive pages, in 
Mr. Sedgefield's editions both of the Saxon and the 
modern English, which are Alfred's original, so that 
we are well able to judge both matter and form of the 
King's work. Indeed, the Consolations of Alfred differ 
from that of Boethius as much as the Confessions of St. 
Augustine differ from the ethical Treatises of Seneca. 
The Consolation of Philosophy seems to have had a 
curious attraction for translators in many languages. 
Mr. Stewart (in his sixth chapter) has given an inter- 
esting account of a great many of these, both English 
and foreign. The list of them fills many pages in 
the British Museum Catalogue. Mr. Sedgefield gives 
a long account of English translations in prose and 
verse, beginning with Chaucer, just five hundred years 
after Alfred, and continuing down to that of H. R. 
James in 1897. In all, Mr. Sedgefield gives speci- 
mens of no less than fourteen versions, from Chaucer 
to the present day, of which five are in prose. The 
most interesting of these versions are the two in prose : 
one by Chaucer at the end of the fourteenth century, one 
by our Queen Elizabeth at the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. We have thus ample opportunity for comparing 
the work of Alfred with that of other translators in 
the course of no less than five centuries. And I 
cannot withhold my own deliberate conviction that, as 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 89 

prose literature, the version of Alfred, in its simplicity, 
dignity, and power, is a finer type than any of the 
successors. 

This is truly wonderful when we remember that the 
first translation is that of our great poet, Geoffrey 
Chaucer. But poets do not always write fine prose ; 
and in the fourteenth century English prose was in 
a conglomerate and formless state. I will illustrate 
this by one or two instances, setting Alfred's prose 
beside that of Chaucer. Of course, to make myself 
intelligible, I shall transliterate Alfred's Anglo-Saxon 
into current English, using Mr. Sedgefield's admirable 
version. But this version is not really a translation. 
It follows the words of Alfred punctiliously, often 
changing nothing or little in the order, and removing 
little but the terminals and archaic forms of the words. 
This is transliteration, but not translation. I need not 
go into the question whether Alfred's Anglo-Saxon is 
English. He calls it English, and in spite of differ- 
ences of construction, syntax, grammar, and vocables, 
it is the basis of English : perhaps two-thirds of it 
closely akin to some English dialects as spoken within 
a few centuries ago. The fact that the ordinary Eng- 
lish reader cannot read a line of it, is not conclusive. 
He cannot read a line of Layamon's Brut or the Ancren 
Riwle, 1 both about a century and a half after the Con- 
quest ; nor indeed could he read a paragraph written 
phonetically in pure Scottish or Yorkshire dialect. 

1 Specimens of Early English, by Morris & Skeat Oxford University Press. 



9<3 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

I shall not enter on the question whether Alfred is 
the founder of English prose. Alfred certainly wrote 
or dictated a fine, organic, rhythmical prose in the 
mother-tongue used by himself and his people in the 
southwest and centre of England. Three-fourths of 
the words in that tongue survive in some altered form 
in English speech and its dialectic varieties. Whether 
it be the same language as English, depends on what 
we mean by that phrase. Grammar, syntax, pronunci- 
ation, have changed. The words mostly remain under 
modern disguises. I am not satisfied by the trenchant 
decision of Professor Marsh {Origin and History of the 
English Language). I prefer the views of Skeat, Morris, 
Earle, Green, and Stopford Brooke. I do not say as 
they do, that Alfred founded English prose. But in 
any case, he founded a prose in the language which is 
the basis of English. 

I now give parallel passages from Alfred and from 
Chaucer. I take first Alfred's rendering of the fifth 
metre of Boethius's first book: the grand hymn — O 
stelliferi conditor orbis. Alfred's prose version is this, 
using always Mr. Sedgefield : — 

" O thou Creator of heaven and earth, that rulest on the 
eternal throne, Thou that makest the heavens to turn in swift 
course, and the stars to obey Thee, and the sun with his shin- 
ing beams to quench the darkness of black night : — (I omit 
four lines) Thou that givest short hours to the days of winter, 
and longer ones to those of summer, Thou that in harvest-tide 
with the strong North-east wind spoilest the trees of their 
leaves, and again in lenten-tide givest them fresh ones with 



THE "WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 9 1 

the soft south-west winds, lo ! all creatures do Thy will, and 
keep the ordinances of Thy commandments, save man only ; 
he setteth Thee at naught." (Sedgefield, p. 5.) 

Now here we have rhythm, force, dignity, and purity 
of phrase. This is fine literary prose — as Mr. Stewart 
well says, " his prose is informed with intensity and 
fire, and possesses all the vigour and swing of verse." 
Or, as Professor Earle says, it has " a very genuine 
elevation without strain or effort." It is true that in 
Mr. Sedgefield's English the order of words and the 
terminations are varied ; but the original has to my ear 
the same fine roll : — 

Eala thu scippend heofenes and eorthan, thu the on 
tha ecan setle ricsast, thu the on hroedum foerelde thone 
heofon ymbhweorfest, and tha tunglu thu gedest the 
gehyrsume. 1 

I now turn to Chaucer's 2 prose version of the same 
passage, modernising the orthography : — 

" O thou maker of the wheel that beareth the stars, which 
that art fastened to thy perdurable chair, and turnest the 
heaven with a ravishing sway, and constrainest the stars to 
suffer thy law; so that the moon sometime shining with her 
full horns, meeting with all the beams of the sun, her brother, 
hideth the stars that be less ; and sometime, when the moon, 
pale with her dark horns, approacheth the sun, loseth her 
lights : . . . Thou restrainest the day by shorter dwelling, 
in the time of cold winter that maketh the leaves to fall. 



1 Sedgefield's Anglo-Saxon text, p. 10. 

2 The Complete Works of Chaucer, by W. W. Skeat, D.C.L. Seven volumes. 
8vo. Oxford University Press, 1 894-1 897, Vol. II, p. 16. 



92 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

Thou dividest the swift tides of the night, when the hot 
summer is come. Thy might attempereth the variant seasons 
of the year ; so that Zephyrus, the debonair wind, bringeth 
again in the first summer season the leaves that the wind 
hight Boreas hath reft away in autumn, that is to say, in the 
last end of summer. There is nothing unbound from his 
old law, nor forsakes the work of his proper estate. O thou 
governour governing all things by certain end, why refu'sest 
thou only to govern the works of men by due manner." 

Let us turn to the version of Queen Elizabeth, 
made exactly two centuries later : — 

" O framer of starry circle 

who leaning to the lasting groundstone 
With whirling blast heavens turnest 

and Law compellst the skies to bear, 
Now that with foil horn, 

meeting all her brother's flames 
the lesser stars the moon dims 

Now dark and pale her horn," l 

But I cannot inflict on you any more of her Majesty's 
doggrel. She should have sent for Spenser or Shake- 
speare to help her, if she was bent on poetry. 
Here is a specimen of the Queen's prose : — 

" This, when with continual woe I had burst out, seeing 
her with mild countenance nothing moved by my moans : 
1 When thee,' quoth she, ' sad and wailing I saw, straight a 
wretch and exile I knew thee, but how far off thy banishment 
was, but that thou toldest, I knew not.' " 

What a rigmarole in Queen's English ! A question 

1 Elizabeth's Boetbius (E. E. Text Society, 1899). Manuscripts Record Office, 
Domestic Elizabeth, 289. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 93 

may be asked — how can it be that the Saxon of 
Alfred in the ninth century can bear any comparison 
with the English of Chaucer in the fourteenth century, 
much less with the prose in the age of Shakespeare, 
Bacon, and Hooker in the sixteenth century ? The 
answer I think is this. The old English of Alfred was 
a very simple, perfectly pure, and unmixed dialect of 
the great Gothic family of languages, of the Low- 
German class. It is homogeneous, with a limited 
vocabulary, using case endings like Latin, and not 
many prepositions. It was an easy instrument to 
wield, and a man of genius, nurtured in the poetry of 
centuries could at once become master of it. In 
the age of Chaucer, English had become much in- 
creased in its vocabulary ; thousands of French and 
Latin words were being assimilated or tried; the struc- 
tural form had been changed ; and English prose was 
in a chaotic state, a state of solution. Chaucer's prose 
is immeasurably inferior to his verse. He did make 
a verse rendering of the fifth metre of Book II — 
Felix nimium prior aetas 1 which makes us long that 
he had translated Boethius's whole work into poetry, 
not into prose. Prose, as every one knows, is a plant 
of much slower growth than poetry. I am prepared 
to say it is more difficult, and in its highest flights a 
gift far more rare. And even in the age of Elizabeth, 
seven hundred years after Alfred, English prose was 

1 Given by Skeat in his Chaucer, Vol. I, p. 380. Slightly modernised it runs : — ■ 

" A blissful life, a peaceful and a sweet, 
Ledden the peoples in a former age — " 



94 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

only becoming perfectly organic in the hands of 
Hooker and Bacon. 

But my purpose was not to make comparisons, but 
to direct attention to the dignity and beauty of Alfred's 
own thoughts. And for that end I will take a few 
passages which are Alfred's own, not translations from 
Boethius. Here is a bit from his introduction : — 

" But cruel King Theodoric heard of these designs, and 
straightway commanded that Boethius be thrust into a dun- 
geon and kept locked therein. Now, when this good man 
fell into so great straits, he waxed sore of mind, by so much 
the more that he had once known happier days. In the prison 
he could find no comfort ; falling down, grovelling on his face, 
he lay sorrowing on the floor, in deep despair, and began to 
weep over himself, and to sing : and this was his song." 

(S. p. 2.) 

What simple, pure, and rhythmical English, as formed 
and lucid as the English of Bunyan or of Defoe ! 

Another bit of Alfred's own, and what is so rare with 
him, a simile. Philosophy says : — 

" When I rise aloft with these my servants {i.e. true wis- 
dom and various skill) we look down upon the storms of this 
world, even as the eagle does when he soars in stormy weather 
above the clouds where no winds can harm him." (S. p. 2.) 

Alfred is never more himself than when musing on 
his royal office : — 

" Power is never a good thing, save its possessor be good, 
for, when power is beneficent, this is due to the man who 
wields it. Ye need not take thought for power nor endeavour 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED $$ 

after it, for if ye are only wise and good it will follow you, 
even though ye seek it not." (S. p. 35.) 

What a magnificent Te Deum is this ! 

" One Creator there is without any doubt, and He is the 
ruler of heaven and earth and of all creatures, visible and in- 
visible, even God Almighty. Him serve all things that serve, 
they that know Him and they that know Him not, they that 
know they are serving Him and they that know it not. He 
hath established unchanging habits and natures and likewise 
natural concord among all His creatures, even as He hath 
willed, and for as long as He hath willed; and they shall 
remain for ever." (S. p. 50.) 

Hear how the head of the royal house of Cerdic, after 
some four centuries of kingly descent, speaks of nobil- 
ity of birth : — 

"Lo! all men had the like beginning, coming from one 
father and one mother, and they are still brought forth alike. 
Why then do ye men pride yourselves above others without 
cause for your high birth, seeing ye can find no man but is 
high-born, and all men are of like birth, if ye will but bethink 
you of their beginning and their Creator ? True high birth 
is of the mind, not of the flesh ; and every man that is given 
over to vices forsaketh his Creator, and his origin, and his 
birth, and loseth rank till he fall to low estate." (S. p. 75.) 

Alfred takes small count of evil rulers. He says : — 

" We see them seated on high seats ; bright with many 
kinds of raiment, decked with belts and golden-hilted swords 
and war dress of many kinds. . . . But if thou wert to strip 
off his robes from such an one, and take away his company of 
retainers, then thou wouldst see that he is no more than any 



g6 THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

one of the courtiers who minister to him, if it be not some one 
of even lower degree." (S. p. 128.) 

When we reach the grand prose hymn with which 
the book closes, I can find nothing more nobly ex- 
pressed in the thousand years of English literature of 
which Alfred is the John the Baptist. 

"To God all is present, both that which was before and 
that which is now, yea, and that which shall be after us ; 
all is present to Him. His abundance never waxeth, nor 
doth it ever wane. He never calleth aught to mind, for He 
hath forgotten naught. He looketh for naught, pondereth 
naught, for He knoweth all. He seeketh nothing, for He 
hath lost nothing. He pursueth no creature, for none may 
flee from him; nor doth He dread aught, for none is more 
mighty than He, none is like unto Him. He is ever giving, 
yet He never waneth in aught. He is ever Almighty, for 
He ever willeth good and never evil. He needeth nothing. 
He is ever watching, never sleeping. He is ever equally 
beneficent. He is ever eternal, for the time never was when 
He was not, nor ever shall be. . . . Pray for what is right 
and needful for you, for He will not deny you. Hate evil, 
and flee from it. Love virtue and follow it. Whatsoever 
ye do is ever done before the Eternal and Almighty God ; He 
seeth it all, and all He judges and will requite." (S. p. 174.) 

I do not pretend to be a judge of sacred poetry ; 
but I almost doubt if Dante, or A Kempis, or Milton 
have poured forth any psalm more truly in a devout 
spirit. I hold it to be in the way of pure and nervous 
English as fine as any similar outpouring in our 
language. 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 97 

I do not touch on the difficult points in the Alfred 
manuscripts. These technicalities I leave to the ex- 
perts. But I think the " experts " have been too posi- 
tive in rejecting pieces on some very slight suggestion 
in orthography and dialect. From the literary point of 
view, I see no reason to deny the authenticity of the 
simple Proem, and still less of the noble Prayer which 
ends the Consolations. Both are to my mind instinct 
with the mother-wit, primeval simplicity, and God- 
fearing soul of the purest of kings, and the most 
spiritual of warriors and statesmen. 

Nor need we discuss at length the vexed problem 
of the authenticity of the alliterative verses translating 
the poetry of Boethius, which are appended to the 
Cotton (Otho A. vi) manuscript. This has been treated 
mainly as a question of paleography and dialect ; and 
the experts are divided and doubtful. I see no reason 
to doubt the conclusion of Mr. Stopford Brooke and 
of Mr. Sedgefield, that no good ground has yet been 
given to doubt that Alfred wrote the verse as well as 
the prose. The Proem, which I hold to be Alfred's 
dictation, distinctly says that after he had <c turned 
the book from Latin into English prose he wrought 
it up once more into verse." The verse is not alto- 
gether poetry ; it cannot compare with Beowulf and 
Caedmon. But to my ear it has the ring of Alfred's 
manly and native voice. 

I will go on to say that even as verse these pieces 
do not seem to me quite so poor. Alfred, like many 
of us who love poetry, cannot compose poetry. And 



9 8 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 



we do know some enthusiasts who persist in writing 
verses, when they know (or ought to know) that they 
cannot compose poetry. Alfred's verses seem to me 
the kind of lines that a great prose-writer, one who 
loved and studied poetry, but was not a born poet, 
might indite to occupy his hours of meditation. I 
confess I think there is a good ring in these lines : — 



'•< Over Jove's mountain 
Gorged with glory, 
In fight with foemen. 
Fluttered on the staff. 
All Italy over 



came many a Goth 
greedy to wrestle 
The banner flashing 
Freely the heroes 
were eager to roam. 



The wielders of bucklers, 
Even to Jove's mount 
Where in mid sea-streams 
That mighty island, 



bearing onward 
far on to ocean 
Sicily lieth, 
far famed of lands." 

(S.p. 178.) 

Here is the metrical alliterative version of the grand 
prayer — O stelliferi conditor Orbis — of which we have 
just had the prose version: — 

" O Thou Creator of bright constellations, 

Of heaven and of earth ; Thou on thy high-seat 



Reignest eternal — 
All swiftly rollest 
The lights of heaven 



Thou the round heaven 
Thou by thy holy might 
causest to hear Thee." 

(S. p. 182.) 

I will not say that this is poetry ; but it is, I think, 
as good as Sternhold and Hopkins's Psalms of David. 

Here is a bit which has a touch of imagination in it 
— not entirely that of Boethius. The verse is more 
vivid : — 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 99 

" Feather- wings have I fleeter than a bird's 

With which I may fly far from the earth 

Over the high roof of the heaven above us ; 

But oh ! that I might thy mind furnish, 

Thy inmost wit, with these my wings, 

Until thou mightest on this world of mortals, 

On all that there liveth look down from on high." 

(S. p. 222.) 

Before I close, I will remind you of the judgment 
passed on Alfred's books by the accomplished histo- 
rian of English literature — Mr. Stopford Brooke. 
" He was," he says, " the creator and then the father 
of English prose literature." His books "were the 
origin of English prose." The personal element, as he 
adds, stands forth clear in all his literary work. Mr. 
Stopford Brooke does not, I hold, quite do justice to 
Alfred's literary power as a translator when he says he 
had no creative power. Was not the translation of the 
Bible into English, yea, into German, perhaps into 
Latin also, a literary masterpiece, even though the 
translators inserted no new ideas of their own, or 
rather did not do so of malice aforethought ? A great 
translation is a masterpiece ; and two at least of Alfred's 
books are masterpieces in translation. But Mr. Stop- 
ford Brooke does full justice to Alfred's style as a 
writer. And to create the style of a new literature, to 
found the prose style of a nation, is a supreme literary 
triumph. Whether Alfred founded English prose style, 
is a question of the meaning of the phrase. Alfred, 
King of various tribes, then dwelling in England, com- 
posed in the vernacular a regular prose style not matched 
• LofC. 



IOO THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED 

by any prose in England until the translators of the 
Psalms and Job, and in quiet force, simplicity, and 
purity not surpassed until the age of Addison. 

We all know the often quoted, often misquoted 
phrase of Buffbn, — le style est Vhomme mime. Of no 
one could this be said more truly — I venture to say 
so truly — as of Alfred. The whole range of ancient 
and modern literature contains nothing more genuine, 
more natural, more pellucid. He is not composing a 
book to be studied, admired, or criticised. He is bar- 
ing his whole soul to us. He speaks as one on his 
knees, in the silence of his own chamber, in the pres- 
ence of his God, who is pouring forth his inmost 
thoughts, hopes, and sorrows to the all-seeing eye, 
which knoweth the secrets of every heart, from whom 
nothing is hidden or unknown. And as he opens to 
us his own soul, as freely as he would bare it to his 
Maker, we look down into one of the purest, truest, 
bravest hearts that ever beat within a human frame. 

And by virtue of his noble simplicity of nature, this 
warrior, this ruler, this hero achieved a literary feat ; for 
he created a prose style five centuries before Chaucer, 
seven centuries before Shakespeare or Bacon, eight 
centuries before Addison or Defoe, and the full mastery 
of simple English prose. This in itself is a fact pecul- 
iarly rare in the history of any literature, where prose 
comes so much later than poetry. It can only be ex- 
plained by remembering that the language which Alfred 
spoke and wrote was not exactly early English, nor 
middle English, much less that highly composite and 



THE WRITINGS OF KING ALFRED IOI 

tessellated mosaic we call the latest and contemporary 
English. It was but the bony skeleton of our Eng- 
lish, what the Palatine mount of Romulus was to im- 
perial Rome, what Wessex was to the present empire 
of the King. But it was the bones of our common 
tongue ; it was the bones with the marrow in them, 
ready to be clothed in flesh and equipped with sinews 
and nerves. But this simple and unsophisticated 
tongue the genius of our Saxon hero so used and 
moulded that he founded a prose style, and taught the 
English race to trust to their own mother-tongue from 
the first ; to be proud of it, to cultivate it, to record in 
it the deeds of their ancestors, and to hand it on as a 
national possession to their children. To this it is due 
(as Professor Earle so truly says) that " we alone of all 
European nations have a fine vernacular literature in 
the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries," so that 
neither the French immigration, nor any other immi- 
gration has ever been able to swamp our English lan- 
guage. And when I say We> I do not mean Britons. 
I mean You of the Western Continent as much as us 
in the British islands. Alfred was as much your 
teacher, your ancestor, your hero, as he was ours. He 
spoke that tongue, he founded that literature, which is 
imperishable on both sides of the Atlantic, which is one 
of the chief glories of the human race, which the three 
corners of the world shall never be able to swamp by 
any immigration of any foreign speech — whilst we who 
are set to guard our common tongue, in the words of 
our great poet, to ourselves do rest but true. 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



The Dutch Republic 

Address at Columbia College, New York, March, 1901 

Since the close of the Middle Ages four great peo- 
ples have succeeded in winning their freedom from 
civil and religious oppression, and have founded 
powerful and independent republics at the cost of 
their blood and a stormy revolution. These four 
were the people of Holland in the close of the six- 
teenth century, the people of England in the Civil 
Wars of the seventeenth century, and the people of the 
United States and of France in the second half of the 
eighteenth century. The revolutions of the Dutch 
and the Americans were primarily directed against 
foreign oppression ; those of England and France 
were purely national uprisings which themselves 
ended in international oppression. All four revolu- 
tionary struggles, though separated by two centuries 
in time and by two hemispheres in space, had an inti- 
mate filiation of ideas with each other. All four, in 
different degrees, were at once both spiritual and po- 
litical in aim, both intellectual and material in origin ; 
and all four, in varying ways, tended to found a new 
conception of the social commonwealth. 

105 



106 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

I am now to speak of the Dutch Republic — the 
movement which, of all these four, was the earliest 
nearly by a century, founded a commonwealth that 
had far the longest duration ; it was the movement 
which, of all the four, called forth the most magnifi- 
cent display of heroism and endurance, which was 
victorious over the most terrific odds, which was (of 
the European movements, at any rate) the one least 
stained by anarchy, crimes, and horrors ; a revolution 
which was organised by one of the purest heroes in 
modern history. Of all the chiefs who in the latter 
ages have led a free people against their oppressors we 
can count only Cromwell and Washington as worthy 
to rank in genius and in nobleness with William the 
Silent, Prince of Orange. 

Not only was the struggle of the people of the 
Netherlands far the earliest, but it was also the most 
desperate and the most prolonged. Its first and most 
terrible bout was continued for some forty-two years 
from 1567 to 1609, and after an interval of twelve 
years it was again renewed from 1621 to 1648 — hav- 
ing been, with intervals, a war to the knife for more 
than eighty years. It was waged by a small and 
divided people against the most powerful monarch in 
Christendom, who hurled on them the most warlike 
soldiery in Europe, led by some of the most famous 
captains in modern history, and directed by some of 
the subtlest politicians of an age of experienced and 
sagacious statesmen. The petty province, hardly 
larger than a great English county, and not so popu- 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC IO7 

lous, was for three generations assailed by all that war, 
famine, pillage, fire, torture, persecution, and inunda- 
tion could do. It was deluged in turn with blood and 
with the salt sea — ruined first by exactions, then by 
confiscation, waste, destruction, and conflagration. And 
yet, after forty years of frightful suffering and heroic 
endurance in which old and young, men, women, and 
children, took equal share, the Dutch Republicans 
broke the power of Spain and swept her from their 
seas ; and, after the second war of the seventeenth 
century, the States, by the Treaty of Munster (1648), 
humbled Spain in the dust, and were recognised as one 
of the greatest, richest, most aspiring Powers in Europe. 

There is an often-quoted passage in a fine book — . 
Voltaire's Essai sur les Mceurs — which is so brilliant 
and yet so truthful a summary of this great struggle, 
that I shall venture to quote it once more. 

He says : — 

" When we study the rise of the Dutch Republic, a state 
once hardly known, but one that in a brief space rose to a 
great height, we are struck by the fact that it was formed 
without design, and contrary to all that could have been 
expected. The revolution was begun by large and wealthy 
provinces of the mainland — Brabant, Flanders, and Hainault, 
— yet they did not shake off the tyrant. But a small corner 
of land, itself almost drowned by the sea, which subsisted only 
by its herring fishery, rose to be a formidable Power, held its 
own against Philip II, despoiled his successors of almost all 
their possessions in the East Indies — and ended by becoming 
their patrons and protectors." 



108 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

This eloquent passage is a truthful picture of the 
great struggle which lasted with the interval I have 
stated for more than eighty years. I might occupy 
an evening in attempting to give you the history of 
any single one of these eighty years, and not one of 
them is wanting in thrilling interest. But my subject 
is simply the Rise of the Dutch Republic ; and I shall 
understand by that the period comprised in Motley's 
work of this title which covers the twenty years or so 
from the beginning of the movement until the murder 
of the Prince of Orange in 1584. And I need hardly 
say that I can attempt to give you not the events of 
these crowded twenty years, but the main conclusions 
and problems. My subject, in fact, centres round the 
later life of " Father William," the founder of Dutch 
freedom and Dutch Protestantism. 

To make my remarks intelligible, I will begin by a 
very brief outline of the principal events in the five 
and twenty years from 1559 to 1584. In 1506, 
Charles V of Spain, afterward the Emperor, succeeded 
to the inheritance of his ancestors, the Dukes of 
Burgundy — of all his vast possessions in the old and 
new world, the most thriving and industrious part. 
His famous abdication at Brussels in 1555 made his 
son, Philip II, King of Spain and Duke of Brabant, 
though of course not emperor as the empire was 
elective. For some four years Philip remained in the 
Provinces, carrying on a successful war with France, 
and vainly striving to crush the free burghers of the 
Low Countries into Spanish servitude and Catholic 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



IO9 



orthodoxy. Recognising his impotence, the sanguin- 
ary bigot withdrew to Spain to superintend auto-da-fes, 
furiously inveighing against the stubbornness of the 
Netherlands, and the machinations of their leader, the 
Prince of Orange. He was secretly planning a terrific 
vengeance and wholesale persecution. 

After six years of veiled rebellion by the Flemings 
and irresolute oppression by the King's viceroys, Philip 
resolved to carry out the decrees of the Council of 
Trent, by all the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, 
and shortly afterward armed insurrection begins. The 
monster Alva, one of the most consummate soldiers 
of his age, and a tyrant only second in ferocity and 
craft to Philip himself, was sent to the Provinces with a 
magnificent army of twenty thousand men, — Spanish, 
Italian and German. William withdraws before the 
storm into his ancestral countship of Nassau ; Egmont 
and Horn are seized and executed ; the Blood-Tri- 
bunal was set up ; and a reign of terror by stake, axe, 
torture, fire and sword was established. For six years 
this raged unchecked. Eighteen thousand persons 
were put to death for religion ; and twice or thrice that 
number were destroyed in battle, in sieges, or in gen- 
eral massacres. The armies of Alva and Alexander of 
Parma swept away the untrained burghers of Flanders 
and Holland, or the mutinous mercenaries whom the 
Nassaus hired in Germany. The patriot armies were 
massacred like sheep, city after city was stormed, and no 
sooner stormed but sacked with every form of ferocity, 
greed, and lust, and the whole population put to the 



110 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

sword. Still they would not submit, and a new turn was 
given to the struggle by the Dutch of the Northern 
Provinces taking to the sea — " Water- Beggars," as 
they chose to call themselves. They seized Briel, 
Flushing, and other ports in the low tide-swept islands 
commanding the great rivers as they pour into the 
German Ocean. Louis of Nassau attacked the Span- 
iards in the South and in the end the Dutch asserted 
their hold on the provinces we now call Holland. 
Alva was succeeded by Requesens, Don John of 
Austria, and Alexander of Parma, the last, the ablest 
soldier of them all. More defeats of the patriots 
followed, more cities were sacked and burnt, more 
provinces were desolated, and tens of thousands were 
massacred in cold blood. All three brothers of Will- 
iam fell in the field ; he was left alone of all the nobles 
of the country in arms. But slowly and steadily by 
sheer force of suffering and stubborn resistance, the 
Northern Provinces which we now call Holland won 
their virtual independence — in the grand words of 
the Roman poet: — 

" per damna, per caedes, ab ipso 
ducit opes animumque ferro." 

Though defeated in every battle in the open field, 
the heroism of the defenders of Alkmaar, Haarlem, 
and Leyden equalled, if it did not surpass, the martial 
prowess of the Spanish veterans. For a moment the 
whole seventeen provinces — we may call them roughly 
Holland and Belgium — were united. But this 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC III 

hollow union lasted but a few months, and about 1577, 
after some ten or eleven years of struggle the Northern 
Dutch Provinces were separated from the Southern 
Belgian Provinces, and accepted William as their 
chief. Steadily the vast power and military resources 
of Spain recovered the Belgic Catholic population 
which the House of Hapsburg retained until the end 
of the last century. And as steadily the Dutch Prov- 
inces of the North grew in strength, wealth, and 
patriotic energy. The union of Utrecht united the 
seven Batavian Provinces in 1579, just twenty years 
after the withdrawal of Philip, twenty years of frightful 
suffering and heroic struggle. The Prince of Orange 
was wisely, firmly, and impartially cementing this 
Commonwealth into a hardy and rising State, when to 
the horror of his own countrymen, and to the eternal 
shame of all bigots and tyrants, he was foully murdered 
by one of the paid assassins commissioned by the king 
of Spain. 

This tremendous struggle of more than eighty years 
never would have been possible but for the foresight, 
wisdom, and tenacity of William the Silent who may 
be truly said to have founded a nation, even more than 
Alfred created the English nation, as Washington 
created the United States. The struggle was carried 
on for more than sixty years after his death ; but, had 
it not been for the desperate efforts he directed for the 
first twenty years before, there would have been no 
struggle at all. Philip would have annihilated the 
feeble resistance of the Netherlands, divided by race, 



112 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

religion, and local jealousies, and without leaders, 
resources, or any definite policy. William of Nassau 
and his family supplied leaders, a consistent policy, 
vast resources in money, and wide relations with Ger- 
many, France, and England. The Netherlands owed 
their salvation from a bloody tyranny to the heroic 
House of Nassau — and in a peculiar sense to the 
genius and indomitable will of the head of that house, 
William, Prince of Orange. 

He had been trained from boyhood by Charles V, 
the Emperor, who regarded him as his adopted son, 
and the future mainstay of his own successor, Philip II. 
So soon as the Prince fully understood the nature and 
designs of the new king of Spain, he quietly but reso- 
lutely set himself to checkmate them. For six years, 
as general minister and counsellor of the Spanish gov- 
ernment in the Netherlands, the Prince carried on a 
politic but outwardly loyal opposition to the tyrant's 
project of stamping out the new religion which, from 
North Germany, Geneva, and England, was making 
rapid progress, and of suppressing any show of local 
independence or right of taxation and representation. 
The efforts of William the Silent — who ought rather 
to be called William the politic, the persuasive, the 
affable — carried on the same work as did Hampden, 
Pym, and Cromwell in the early days of the contest 
with Charles I. And for some years he and his friends 
were entirely successful. And but for the fanatical 
violence of the Calvinists and their revolutionary out- 
breaks — and if Philip had been simply Duke of Bra- 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC II3 

bant and Count of Holland, residing in Netherlands, 
and maintained by Flemish arms alone — there can be 
no doubt that William's scheme of founding a consti- 
tutional monarchy would have been crowned with an 
early and ample success. 

Two things brought it to failure. The first was the 
furious temper of the Calvinist fanatics, and the fact 
that Philip was king of Spain, the most powerful 
monarch in Christendom, in command of boundless 
resources and the most brilliant soldiery known to 
modern history. The outbreak at Antwerp wrecking 
the noble cathedral, and the frenzy which carried simi- 
lar outrages upon the religion of the State and of the 
majority, roused the Spanish nation, its king and the 
soldiers and nobles throughout his vast dominions to 
a passionate thirst for vengeance, which the Church 
excited to a white heat. Philip organised a magnifi- 
cent army of some twenty thousand veteran troops, 
Spanish, Italian, and German, whom he despatched to 
Brussels to crush Protestantism and local liberty under 
the terrible Alva, one of the most pitiless and unscru- 
pulous monsters of that age of perfidy and blood. 
Before this overwhelming power the Prince withdrew 
to his native Germanv. 

He withdrew but only to organise a desperate 
resistance. 

For seventeen years he carried on the fight with 
the most marvellous energy, resource, and stubborn- 
ness — almost always defeated in the open field, pour- 
ing out the wealth of himself and his family like 



114 TH£ DUTCH REPUBLIC 

water, seeing one combination after another break up 
under the terror inspired by the Spanish arms, seeing 
one ally after another desert him, one foreign poten- 
tate after another play him false, and one brother after 
another slaughtered in fight. History presents 
hardly any other spectacle of dogged determination 
under incessant failure and defeat, and such versatility 
of resource in devising new plans after every failure 
and in organising fresh forces as each in succession was 
crushed or wiped out. 

The marvellous ingenuity of these efforts was 
equalled only by the inexhaustible industry with which 
they were pursued. Some twenty or thirty volumes 
of very close print now reveal to us the endless 
schemes that for twenty years the Prince projected or 
matured. A mass of this correspondence exists in 
Mss. signed by William, or addressed to him. He 
seems to have spent hours almost daily in dictating 
despatches and secret instructions on every conceiv- 
able point. He had agents all over Germany, where 
his brothers and relations were powerful counts and 
officials, in France, all over the Netherlands, in Eng- 
land, even in Rome, and in the palaces of Philip, whose 
secret despatches were copied in his cabinet and sent 
off to the Prince. He held in his hand for twenty 
years the threads of numberless negotiations, plots, 
intrigues in many countries ; he was constantly organ- 
ising new levies, fresh campaigns, or local risings. 
And from hour to hour he had to decide a mass of 
details as to war, administration, diplomacy, religion, 
local disputes and suspicions. 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC II5 

It is in vain that we ask from William the Silent — 
I prefer to call him William the Politic — that native 
veracity of soul, that absolute transparency and recti- 
tude of purpose which is so singularly rare in states- 
men — which we find in Alfred, in St. Louis, in 
George Washington — but perhaps in no other man 
in supreme rule. Though William never sank to the 
chicanery and mendacity of such men as Louis XI, 
or Oueen Elizabeth, or Mazarin, he was dark, secret, 
and double-tongued even as at times were Richelieu, 
Cromwell, Frederick, and Bismarck. He was no 
spotless hero, no knight of romance, no mirror of 
purity and truth. He was brought up in the worst 
school of the worst age of Machiavellian craft; and, 
though infinitely superior to the political schemers of 
his age, he is no model of honour himself. 

His true greatness was in his essential singleness of 
purpose, — his unselfish devotion to a people which 
was in no sense his own by birth, — in his resolute 
rejection of dignity, power, or any kind of personal 
gain, in his abhorrence of persecution and intoler- 
ance, and above all in his sublime constancy to the 
cause to which he dedicated his life, his whole earthly 
possessions, his peace, his family, and his good name, 
and the unconquerable courage by which he held 
to his purpose in spite of incessant defeat, and never 
for an instant gave way to despair, though racked 
with disease, deserted by all, and baffled a thousand 
times in the long struggle by what looked to all men 
an overwhelming power. 



1 1 6 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

This heroic struggle of the Dutch to assert freedom 
of conscience and national independence, notwithstand- 
ing its narrow field, and, from a European point of 
view, its petty scale, exercised a decisive influence over 
the whole course of modern history. It was the first 
example in modern Europe of a small and poor coun- 
try throwing off the weight of a foreign oppression 
and founding a free commonwealth on an enduring 
basis. Two centuries later its moral influence across 
the Atlantic, where a part of the American people 
were then of Dutch origin, is too obvious to be 
enlarged upon. But long before that, Holland had 
been the refuge of the oppressed, the home of freedom 
of thought, of Biblical religion, and of republican 
ideals. Its great service was to have instituted the 
duty of Toleration — in the spirit so nobly begun by 
William the Silent, and carried on by Barneveldt and 
De Witt, and Grotius. The relations of the Presby- 
terians of our own land with the Presbyterians of 
Holland were long and close ; and many a victim of 
Stuart, Bourbon, and Papal tyranny found an asylum 
in the free republic. During the political and relig- 
ious persecutions that for a century followed the 
Revocation of the edicts of Nantes by Louis XIV, 
the French Protestants and Reformers found a refuge 
in Holland. Descartes and Bayle lived and worked 
in Holland ; and most of the unorthodox books 
which preceded the French Revolution profess on 
their title page to be published in Amsterdam. Thus, 
if the Dutch Republic was not politically associated 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I17 

with the Republic in France, from which it was sepa- 
rated in time by two centuries, so directly as it was 
associated with the Commonwealth in England and 
the Independence of the United States, its intellectual 
and moral influence as a type of freedom of conscience 
was very marked and decisive. 

The Dutch Republic is not only the earliest 
example in modern Europe of the establishment of 
a free commonwealth, — we may put aside some petty 
cantons in mountain strongholds of mediaeval origin, 
— but it has had the longest duration. The free gov- 
ernment of Holland founded by William the Silent 
has now endured, we may say, for upwards of three 
centuries. It is true that his descendants for long 
periods held the hereditary office of Stadtholders ; it 
is true that the Government of the United Provinces 
was not seldom arbitrary and oppressive. It is true 
that Holland has been now for eighty-eight years 
formally a kingdom. But it is still a free national 
government as completely as our own. Holland, for 
the 317 years since the murder of William of Orange, 
has been in the main a free, independent, and thriving 
State ; and the charming young Queen, now in her 
twenty-first year, still rules the land created and saved 
by her great ancestor. 

The struggle carried on by the people of Holland 
against all the might of Spain was for at least twenty 
years one of the most wonderful recorded in history. 
It may almost be compared to the defence of Greece 
against the myriads of Xerxes the great king. Philip II 



I I 8 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

was absolute master of all Spain, of the Milanese, of 
Naples and Sicily, not to speak of his boundless pos- 
sessions in the Indies from which streamed in for him 
incredible treasures in merchandise and gold. For the 
greater part of the struggle he held in stern subjection 
the great cities and rich provinces of Belgium. His 
Spanish infantry, his Italian cavalry and engineers were 
accounted the finest in the world. His footmen carried 
muskets, an arm till then almost unknown in Northern 
Europe. His generals and officers of every rank were 
consummate soldiers ; in strategy, in tactics, in the 
melee, alike unsurpassed. Such captains as Alva, Don 
John of Austria, and Alexander of Parma were men 
of world-wide experience and true genius for war. 
Such an army as Alva led across Europe from Italy 
to Brussels on his terrible mission was an army per- 
fect in every respect even from the point of view of 
modern war, — exact in discipline, duly proportioned 
in each arm, amply equipped, provided with officers 
of highest skill, and inspired by the grand munition 
of all armies, unbounded confidence in themselves and 
their leaders. 

In spite of their ferocious conduct in the storm and 
their horrible duties as executioners, it is impossible 
not to be struck with wonder at the heroism of the 
Spanish infantry, at the impetuous valour of captains 
like Don Frederic, Vitelli, or Mondragon, who marched 
his men at night for miles through sea-water up to 
their shoulders, and then captured a fortress as they 
emerged from the sea. It is impossible not to admire 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC II9 

the genius of Alexander Farnese, who in an hour and 
a half, with a few squadrons of cavalry and without 
loss, annihilated a brave army of twenty thousand 
men. Spain supplied the tyrant with dauntless war- 
riors ; Italy supplied him with consummate tacticians, 
administrators, and engineers; Germany and the Rhine- 
land supplied him with willing mercenaries and soldiers 
of fortune; the Indies supplied him with inexhaustible 
gold, and Rome supplied him with the confiscations 
of heretics and the blessing of Heaven. 

See the vast strength of the Spanish tyranny ! 
Philip had not been three years on the throne of his 
father when he succeeded in humbling the whole 
power of France under her warlike King Henry II, by 
the brilliant victories of St. Quentin and Gravelines. 
A few years later his heroic half-brother, Don John, 
destroyed the magnificent navy of the Turks at Le- 
panto. And toward the close of his long reign he 
threatened England with the Armada — from which 
imminent peril we were saved by the skill of our sea- 
dogs and by a portentous tempest. That a despot of 
such vast resources, such splendid armies and mighty 
fleets, who seemed to his contemporaries, at least for 
some twenty years, to overshadow Europe and domi- 
nate the Western Continent, should have been defied, 
baffled, outmanoeuvred, and eventually beaten by a 
poor and petty province, half of it salt marsh, inhab- 
ited by an unwarlike race of fishermen, and having no 
cities but a dozen or so of small towns, — this is a 
standing marvel of history. The only solution of the 



120 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

dilemma is the invincible power of courage, tenacity, 
a profound belief in a great cause, and the strength 
that lies in a man who is at once a hero and a genius. 

The siege of Haarlem, which for seven months re- 
sisted a splendid army of Alva's, equal in number almost 
to the whole population of the town, is one of the 
great sieges in all history. Alva led against it thirty 
thousand of his veterans ; the garrison was never more 
than a few thousand, with some hundreds of fighting 
women, regularly armed under the command of a 
widow lady of rank and good reputation. Twelve 
thousand of the Spaniards had fallen, after discharging 
ten thousand cannon shots upon the town, when 
starvation compelled the surrender. The whole gar- 
rison was butchered, and Philip thanked God and the 
Pope. 

The siege of Alkmaar was quite as heroic and hap- 
pily more successful, for Alva wrote to Philip, " I 
am resolved not to leave a single creature alive ; the 
knife shall be put to every throat." His gentleness 
at Haarlem, he said, had led to no good result ! At 
the first day's assault a thousand choice Spanish troops 
died in the trenches ; men, women, and children of 
the besieged fighting on the ramparts with desperate 
fury. Under the orders of Orange the dykes were 
cut, and after nearly two months the besiegers with- 
drew in despair. 

But the crowning triumph of all was the memorable 
defence of Leyden. That is indeed a story to stir the 
blood. Leyden is a town on the old Rhine, between 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 121 

The Hague and Haarlem, one of the most ancient in 
Europe. Its memorable siege lasted, with a short 
interval, for a whole year, when it finally overcame 
the whole power of Philip. It was invested with 
sixty-two redoubts manned by some ten thousand 
troops under tried captains of Spain. The defenders 
were only the civilian burghers and a few irregular 
soldiers, behind imperfect and ancient walls. Their 
one chance was in William of Orange who was pre- 
paring a force to relieve them, and who adjured them 
to hold out for three months, which they swore to do. 
" As long as there is a living man left in the country," 
they said, " we will fight for our liberty and our reli- 
gion." The city being by June strictly invested, the 
whole population was placed on a food allowance. 
Sorties and fierce combats took place daily. But the 
only chance of relief lay with the Prince of Orange 
who was entrenched near Delft, some twenty miles to 
the south, and was organising a fleet of small ships 
and barges. All prospect of meeting the Spanish 
armies on land was extinct. Louis and Henry of 
Nassau, brothers of the Prince, had but recently been 
defeated and killed in a great battle, with many of 
their friends and four thousand men, and the last 
chance of fighting the Spaniards in the open had been 
swept away. But the Prince, who had now lost three 
brothers in the struggle, would not despair. He tried 
another arm of defence — a new engine of war. 

To understand this wonderful siege — wherein an 
inland city was succoured by seamen in a fleet, and a 



122 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

powerful army in a vast entrenched camp was driven 
off by discharging on them the sea from the German 
Ocean, we must have in our minds a picture of the 
spot. The whole country for fifty miles round is a 
huge plain, redeemed from the sea by centuries of 
labour, and lying many feet below the level of high 
tide, protected by vast dykes along the coast, and an 
intricate network of minor dykes inland, the whole 
intersected with thousands of canals and smaller chan- 
nels, with sluices, gates, and dams innumerable. In 
this teeming plain rose, a few feet above the meadows, 
orchards, and woods, the graceful old city of Leyden, 
with a ruined tower on an artificial mound, by tradition 
said to date from the Romans or from our Saxon Hen- 
gist. The city was itself interlaced with canals — these 
were covered with hundreds of bridges of stone — and 
was protected by a range of ancient walls having huge 
gates and some antiquated towers and bastions. 

The tremendous scheme of defence devised by the 
Prince, with the full assent of the city and the States, 
was to open the dykes that kept back the sea, flood the 
land for leagues, and across the drowned meadows, vil- 
lages, and harvests, to send in to the doomed city the 
flotilla that he was organising with arms and food. It 
was the desperate resort of desperate men ; for it meant 
the ruin of their homes and their lands for a genera- 
tion. But they chose this — or death — rather than 
the Inquisition of Spain. 

On the third of August the Prince in person super- 
intended the cutting of sixteen dykes, and, waiting for 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



123 



the flood to rise, he had two hundred vessels laden 
with provisions. The waters rose slowly ; and toward 
the end of the month the people of Leyden sent word 
that they were near to dying of hunger. " They had 
held out," they said, " for two months with food, 
according to promise, and then for another month, 
without food, but flesh and blood could stand it little 
more." The Prince replied that the dykes were cut 
and he was coming. But he was suddenly prostrated 
with fever, and lay in bed at Rotterdam in danger of 
death, very feeble, and almost speechless, but still dic- 
tating orders and sending messengers right and left. 

By September Admiral Boisot, his chief officer at 
sea, came out of Zeeland with three hundred veteran 
sea-dogs, — wild, fierce men, half pirates, who were 
sworn neither to give nor to ask for quarter, — with 
inscriptions in their caps, " Better be for the Turk 
than for the Pope." With his fierce Zeelanders and 
some twenty-five hundred veteran seamen in large 
barges rowed with oars, and charged with cannon, 
arms, and provisions, Boisot pressed on across the 
flooded plain to within five miles of Leyden. There 
he was stopped by a huge barrier of dykes, whilst the 
Spanish army, three times as strong as his own, blocked 
the road between the dyke and the invested city. By 
the Prince's order the seamen assaulted and carried the 
dyke in a brilliant night attack, and at once, before the 
eyes of the enemy, cut a channel through the obstacle. 
Through it the little fleet poured, but only to find a 
second dyke, still a foot above the water, and guarded 



124 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

by Spaniards. This, too, Boisot carried — but even 
then he found himself barred by overwhelming num- 
bers of the enemy. A strong east wind kept back the 
waters of the ocean and reduced the flood, so that the 
flotilla was aground. But gradually the besieging army 
was driven to narrower limits, and the villages round 
occupied and burnt by the seamen so as to give no 
shelter to the invaders. 

Orange rose from his sick-bed, inspired the patriot 
army to fresh efforts, and ordered the cutting of the 
last dyke. The city was at its last gasp. All they 
knew of relief they had to guess from the roar of can- 
non and the blazing of villages in the distant country. 
Food had disappeared. Dogs, cats, and vermin were 
thought to be luxuries, starving creatures scrambled 
for offal and refuse in the gutters. Infants dropped 
dead from the dry breasts of their mothers, whole 
families were found lying dead in a house, for the 
plague appeared, and from six thousand to eight thou- 
sand died of it out of a population of fifty thousand. 
Still, men and women exhorted each other to endure 
— to resist the Spaniard and his priests — a fate more 
horrible than plague or famine. Some of the faint- 
hearted ones did reproach the heroic burgomaster for 
his obstinacy, and placed a famished corpse against his 
door, as a mute witness to his cruelty. " Here is my 
sword," said he, " take it, kill me, divide me up, and 
eat my flesh — but no surrender whilst I live." 

At the end of September a dove flew into the city 
with a message from Boisot ; but the wind remained 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 1 25 

east, and the waters began to abate. But on the first 
of October a tremendous gale began from the south- 
west, forcing the sea over the plains, filling the canals, 
and carrying the fleet forward. Boisot was now right 
up to the entrenched works and the forts of the Span- 
ish. Terrific day and night combats ensued, the sea 
rising steadily, the ships gaining ground, and the 
enemy sullenly retreating. On the night of the sec- 
ond of October, a combined assault on the Spanish 
lines was made by Boisot in his ships and by the men 
of Leyden in sortie. Caught between two fires, in the 
confusion of a pitch dark night, in the flood and roar 
of tempest, and stunned by the crash of a long section 
of the city wall that fell in the darkness, panic seized 
the enemy, and the Spanish general drew off the rem- 
nant of his splendid army, to such unflooded cause- 
ways and eminences as he could find : " beaten," wrote 
the proud Spaniard, " not by the enemy but by the 
sea!" This time Philip did not thank God — let us 
hope he did nothing worse. 

On the morning of the third of October, a day ever 
memorable in the annals of Holland, — in the annals 
of heroism and patriotism, — Boisot swept into the city 
with his vessels, and the famished populations swarmed 
along the quays, the seamen throwing them bread as 
they rowed up the canals. The Admiral and his men, 
wild Zeelanders and all, burghers, women, and chil- 
dren, poured into the great church and offered up 
thanksgiving and sang a hymn. A message was sent 
to the Prince, which reached him, at Delft, also in 



126 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

church. He had it read to the congregation after the 
sermon, — should we all of us have had patience to sit 
out that sermon, with news of life and death to our 
people in the minister's hand? — but the Dutch are 
a patient and long-suffering race ! The Prince set 
out to Leyden where he was received with enthusiasm. 
" It will cost Philip half his kingdom to make an end 
of us," he had said, and he had kept his word. He 
offered, in the name of the States, that as a reward for 
the sufferings and gallantry of the city, they might 
choose a remission of taxation or the foundation of a 
University, and the tradition is that Leyden chose the 
seat of learning, and rejected the filthy lucre. Should 
we to-day be capable of so noble a devotion to learn- 
ing ? But I believe the tradition to be mythical, and 
that Leyden was duly rewarded by a remission of 
taxes and also honoured by a seat of learning. Cer- 
tain it is that the illustrious University of Leyden, 
the school of so many great teachers, of Grotius, 
Bcerhaave, and a crowd of men of science, of law, of 
theology, and of medicine, down to our day, was 
founded on this occasion, and is thus associated with 
the memorable siege — one of the most splendid 
triumphs of freedom and of constancy in the roll of 
history. 

This tale of slaughter, ferocity, and heroism is only 
an incident in this long struggle. There were scores 
of sieges hardly less terrible, less gallant, though none 
of them so triumphant for the patriots. Whole prov- 
inces were desolated with fire and sword, pillage and 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 27 

flooding ; armies were painfully mustered and equipped 
by William and his family, friends, and colleagues at 
the sacrifice of their entire fortunes, only to be swept 
into the rivers or hacked to pieces in a few hours by 
the matchless chivalry of Spain. Yet by sheer power 
to suffer and to endure, slowly the Northern sea- 
washed districts and the towns therein, which stood on 
piles a few feet above the waters around, won a pre- 
carious independence, began to form a solid confeder- 
acy, nay, rose into flourishing lands and even wealthy 
cities. How was it done? What was the secret? 
" 'Tis dogged as does it ! " — says an old navvy in a 
famous story. " Dogged " — it was — and also the 
magical resources of the sea by those who love the sea 
and know how to use the sea ! The Southern, Catho- 
lic, Belgian Provinces and cities after incessant turmoil 
and bloodshed fell back into the grasp of Spain — 
step by step the Northern, Protestant, Dutch Prov- 
inces and cities asserted their liberty under their 
" Father William." 

Let us try to picture to ourselves this " Father 
William," and see what manner of man he was. If 
anyone were to imagine him to be a dark, inscrutable, 
fanatical Puritan, — a sort of Calvinist Richelieu — a 
Protestant variety of Philip II, — he would indeed go 
wrong. William the Silent, the chief of the Dutch 
national revolution, the head of the Calvinistic Re- 
formers of Holland, was neither taciturn by habit, nor 
a Dutchman by birth, nor a revolutionist in policy, 
nor an advanced reformer in religion. He was a 



128 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

most eloquent speaker, a delightful conversationalist, 
a brilliant man of the world, an accomplished linguist. 
He was by birth a Count of the Empire, a Nassauer, 
a German, of pure High German descent for long 
generations both by his father and his mother. 
Though Prince of Orange, which is on the Rhone in 
southeastern France, he never saw Orange in his life, 
and had little more to do with it than our Prince of 
Wales has to do with his own titular principality. 
William, Count of Nassau, got nothing out of Orange, 
except the barren honour of " Prince," and the degrad- 
ing privilege of being addressed by Philip II as "my 
cousin." His princedom, his vast estates in the Low 
Countries, and his connection with Holland, he owed 
to accident in early youth. They came to him when 
a boy of eleven, in the lifetime of his own parents, 
under the will of his cousin Rene, of that elder branch 
of the Nassau house, settled in the Netherlands. 
From his boyhood William was thus all his life a 
sovereign prince ; he was by instinct a real conserva- 
tive, a moderate, a coalitionist — never a revolutionist. 
By policy he was an opportunist, always prone to 
take half a loaf, to get the best terms to be had at the 
time, to make the most workable compromise in each 
case. 

His precocious apprenticeship in high matters of 
state and his wonderful insight into the nature of 
men he acquired by the favour of that consummate 
diplomatist, the Emperor Charles V, who made the 
young Prince of eleven his page, gave him the best 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC I 29 

education of the age, and kept him, almost as an 
adopted son, about his own person, even calling him 
to his side in his Cabinet whilst discussing affairs of 
moment. For nine years the young Prince was thus 
trained by one of the greatest masters of statecraft in 
an age of profound and ambitious politicians. At the 
age of eighteen, William was given in marriage by the 
Emperor to Anne of Egmont, one of the greatest 
heiresses of the Netherlands ; and their joint posses- 
sions made them one of the wealthiest young couples 
in Northern Europe. The young soldier was shortly 
made a colonel and sent off to fight the French. He 
rose in the service ; and at the age of twenty-two, the 
Emperor, himself one of the first soldiers of his age, 
made the young hero commander-in-chief of an army 
of twenty thousand men. 

For some ten years the Prince continued to serve 
the Emperor, his son Philip II, and their successive 
viceroys in military and civil offices of the first rank. 
He took part in the successful wars against France 
that opened Philip's reign, though he does not appear 
to have done more than prove himself a consummate 
organiser of difficult campaigns, and a most wary and 
provident commander. It was when leaning on the 
shoulder of his beloved Prince, that the broken 
Emperor, in his theatrical scene of abdication, came 
into the Hall of Nobles to abdicate his crown into the 
hands of his own son, Philip. The dying sovereign 
leaned on the two Princes, his adopted and his natural 
son, those two who were destined to wage a deadly 



I30 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

war against each other for nearly thirty years. For 
some years the Prince and his young bride kept royal 
state, as having a household renowned throughout 
Europe for its splendid hospitality, its brilliant refine- 
ment, and its magnificent courtesy. The Prince, 
wrote a bitter Catholic, has the most winning manners, 
the sweetest temper, the most persuasive tongue in the 
world. He leads all the court at his own will, and 
fascinates all he approaches, both high and low. He 
undertook at his own cost splendid embassies ; he 
entertained all royal guests from foreign countries ; he 
raised and maintained whole regiments in the field at 
his own charges, until even his vast revenues became 
encunibered with debt. Down to the age of thirty, 
William of Orange was in fact a grandee of the Span- 
ish Crown, a magnificent Prince in four countries 
which are now France, Germany, Belgium, and Hol- 
land — and till then he was a devoted and indeed a 
loyal servant of the kings of Spain. 

But he soon had a rude awakening from this pros- 
perous pageantry. From the first day he had seen 
deep into the black heart of Philip, and though he 
felt in duty bound to serve him as a sovereign in the 
field and in council, he held him in deep aversion 
and distrust. Orange had a principal hand in the 
negotiations for the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis by 
which Philip so humbled his rival of France, and he 
was sent to Paris as a State hostage along with the 
Duke of Alva, the Prince's future foe, and Count Eg- 
mont, Alva's future victim. There, riding one day 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



l 3 1 



in a hunting expedition, alone beside the French king, 
Henry II, supposing the Prince to be deep in all the 
counsels of Philip, revealed to him the horrid plot 
concocted between Alva and the French court to com- 
bine to crush out the Reformation by all the rigour of 
the Inquisition, Philip to use his Spanish troops in 
the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange — he was 
still only twenty-six — never moved a muscle, but full 
of horror as he was, suffered the King to talk on. 
" I was deeply moved with pity," he wrote twenty 
years later, " for all the worthy people who were thus 
devoted to slaughter, and for the country to which I 
owed so much, wherein they designed to introduce an 
Inquisition more cruel than that of Spain. From 
that hour I resolved with my whole soul to drive the 
Spanish vermin from the land." He hastened to get 
leave of absence, returned to Brussels, saw some of 
his friends and warned them of what was to come. It 
was this incident which gained the title of "the Silent 
One" for a man who was one of the most eloquent 
talkers and one of the most affable companions of his 
age. 

We know how the Prince looked at this time. 
There exists a fine portrait of him painted exactly at 
this age — a replica of which his descendant, the Ger- 
man Emperor, has recently presented to his own 
cousin, the young Queen of the Netherlands. The 
Prince is in full armour resting his left hand firmly 
on his helmet, with powerful features, an open brow, 
auburn hair, large piercing eyes, a very firm, strong 



I32 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

jaw, a mouth closely set, and a massive chin. The 
whole aspect is one of intense penetration, firmness of 
purpose, and even then of deep melancholy. It is 
pathetic to contrast this picture of his resplendent 
youth with the portraits of his last years when, an 
old man at fifty-one, he was bald, worn with wrinkles 
and furrowed with disease and anguish. The mouth 
seems locked with iron, and the deep eyes are those 
of a man at bay fighting fiercely for life. 

In religion, as in all things, the Prince was an 
opportunist, willing, in an age of a wild chaos of be- 
liefs and the clash of sects, to accept the best working 
compromise in outward communion, whilst quietly 
holding his own beliefs and insisting on respect for 
those of others. He was a man of deeply religious 
feeling, and sincere natural piety, sprung of a religious 
family, who himself brought up his own family in 
practical godliness. But he seems never to have held 
to any dogmatic creed whatever. And in an age 
when creeds were all flung together into a melting 
pot, and when each sect in turn was doing deeds and 
uttering maledictions that dishonoured all their pro- 
fessions, William's own religious adhesions were sin- 
gularly varied. He was born and baptized a Lutheran, 
his father and his mother being convinced Protestants. 
When adopted by Charles V at the age of eleven, he 
was brought up a Catholic, and he remained in con- 
formity with the Catholic Church down to the age of 
thirty-four and his withdrawal into Germany. Then 
he was for a time in practical communion with the 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 1 33 

Lutherans ; and finally, when he became chief of the 
Northern States, and Stadtholder of Holland he lived 
and he died a Calvinist. 

Throughout his life he had a loathing for the perse- 
cuting temper of Catholicism ; Lutheranism seemed 
to him always to have too much of the aristocratic and 
political spirit ; and he deeply distrusted the fanatical 
zealotry of Dutch Calvinism. He was always striving 
to create a modus vivendi between bitter partisans. As 
a great Catholic official, he laboured to protect the 
Reformers ; as Lutheran, he laboured to induce them 
to help the Calvinists ; as a Calvinist chief himself, he 
vehemently resisted their unchristian passion against 
all outside their own sect. William's whole life, from 
the day when he listened in horror to the infernal plot 
of the two kings until the day when he gasped out his 
last words, " My God, have pity on my soul and 
this poor people ! " his whole life was a plea for toler- 
ation — mutual forbearance — Christian unity. 

William had four wives, by whom he had thirteen 
children. His first wife, Anne of Egmont, was a 
Catholic, and she died young before the great struggle 
began. His second wife, Anne of Saxony, a Lutheran 
and daughter of the great Lutheran duke, was a 
violent Protestant, the Prince remaining Catholic, and 
baptizing her children in that Church. As she 
plunged into vice and crime he repudiated her. She 
was divorced, tried and condemned by law, and died 
mad in prison. His third wife, whom he married 
whilst the second was alive but divorced, was a Bour- 



134 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

bon princess, an ex-abbess, a convert to Protestantism, 
and a refugee. It was a marriage that filled the 
French Court and the Catholic world with horror, a 
desperately imprudent step on the Prince's part. His 
fourth wife, Louise de Coligny, daughter of the heroic 
Admiral, had seen her father and her husband assassi- 
nated in the Saint Bartholomew, and was destined to 
see her second husband also assassinated before her 
eyes by the same ruthless enemies. 

The Prince was an eminently domestic man, almost 
excessively uxorious, a second father to his widowed 
mother, affectionate to his wives, loving to his chil- 
dren, and the soul of kindness and courtesy to all 
within his household. Of the thirteen children, but 
three sons grew up to manhood. The eldest was 
kidnapped into Spain by Philip and died without 
issue. The second, Maurice, nobly carried on for 
forty years and completed the work of his father. The 
third son, Frederick Henry, was born in the year of 
his father's death, and ultimately succeeded Maurice, 
as Prince of Orange. It is curious to note how many 
famous rulers, soldiers, and royal persons have traced 
their descent to William of Orange. The Princes of 
Orange first, the elective or hereditary rulers of 
Holland from his day until ours, during more than 
three centuries — then of course the second great 
Prince of Orange, William III of Holland and King 
of England. Through daughters come the royal 
family of Prussia, Frederick the Great, and the reign- 
ing Emperor, the Electress Sophia of Hanover, and 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



l 35 



of course all our Hanoverian royal family, then the 
Orleans princes, many of the Italian princes, not to 
speak of Prince Rupert, Marshal Turenne, Alexandra, 
Queen of England, and the royal family of Denmark 
and the Czar of Russia. The ancestors of William 
of Nassau were illustrious for four or five centuries at 
his birth. But his descendants, in the three centuries 
since his death, have been even more profusely scat- 
tered upon the thrones or around the thrones of 
Europe. 

Such was the man who for twenty years withstood 
the machinations, the armies, the assassins of Philip II 
— never despairing, never relaxing his vigilance, never 
driven into crime himself. He countermined the 
conspiracies of Spain by his own foresight and his 
system of spies ; after every defeat he raised up a new 
army ; driven out of one stronghold, he raised up 
another ; after every act of treachery and disunion, he 
set himself indefatigably to piece together a fresh com- 
bination. His knowledge of men, his insight into all 
the windings of the subtlest human heart was intuitive ; 
his patience, his equanimity, his urbanity were never 
shaken for an instant. 

In the long struggle the Prince was deeply changed 
within and without from the chivalrous grandee of his 
youth. His enormous revenues had all been confis- 
cated by the tyrant or sunk in war. But one brother 
survived ; and he and the rest of the family had ruined 
themselves in the cause. Father William, the idol of 
his own Hollanders, looked and lived like the simplest 



I36 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

of his people. A fine courtier of Elizabeth, who saw 
him at Delft in these latter days, said he wore a thread- 
bare old gown that a poor student would have been 
ashamed of, and through it could be seen for waistcoat 
a rough bargee's jersey, and his company was that of 
the citizens of that beery town. No external sign of 
his degree could be seen, but on conversing with him, 
the dainty courtier remarks, " there was an outward 
passage of inward greatness." 

It would have been strange if there had not been 
something to mark the greatest man of his century. 
His later life was one of endless toil and hardship and 
often of real penury. When Louise de Coligny came 
to be married from France, where she had known the 
most brilliant Court in Europe, the Prince of Orange 
sent to bring his bride an open country cart, in which 
she had to sit on a hard board and was cruelly jolted. 
The States assigned to him a small sequestered convent, 
and there he kept a simple and almost open house, 
absorbed in work, and accessible to all. The spot 
still stands unchanged. It is now a national memorial 
and museum, and was the scene of the last tragedy. 

The monster Philip, finding all his efforts to crush 
the Prince in vain, issued, in 1580, by the advice of 
Cardinal Granvelle, his ban whereby he declared 
Orange the enemy of the human race — offered a 
reward of twenty thousand golden crowns for his head, 
and promised his assassin full pardon, and a patent of 
nobility for himself and his family. From that hour 
William was hunted by murderers. One, Jaureguy, 



THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 



l 37 



succeeded in sending a bullet through his cheek and 
palate, severing an artery in the neck. His life was 
saved by a miracle, but his third wife died of the 
shock. William's only care was to call out to spare 
the assassin, and from his sick-bed he saved the accom- 
plices from torture. We know of some five or six 
conspiracies, and doubtless there were as many more 
we do not know of. William, like Elizabeth of Eng- 
land, lived for four years surrounded by assassins ; but, 
alas ! he had no Burleigh, no Walsingham to protect 
him. 

The end — the inevitable end — came at last. Will- 
iam was at table with his family and a friend or two 
in the Hall of the Prinzenhof at Delft, the old con- 
vent. He passed out to his cabinet, and in the dark 
corner of the staircase lay concealed a small fanatic who 
shot him through the chest point blank. The Prince 
sank into the arms of his family, gasping out the words 
I have cited before, " God help this poor people ! " 
It was July, 1584. He still was but fifty-one — in 
the prime of his powers. 

The old Prinzenhof, a convent of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, is now a relic of Dutch patriotism — a place of 
pilgrimage to their people and all who love the cause 
of liberty and conscience. The hall where the hero 
lay dying is now filled with portraits, arms, views, 
engravings, tapestries, chairs, and tables of the period, 
and memorials that record the great struggle. They 
profess to have kept the hole in the wall where the 
fatal bullet struck. That murderous shot filled with 



I38 THE DUTCH REPUBLIC 

triumph and exultation the whole Papal, Jesuit, tyran- 
nic world, and struck indignation and dismay into the 
patriots, and all friends of the Protestant and national 
cause. It struck them with dismay, but not with 
despair. The people of Holland and Maurice of Nas- 
sau, his son, took up the gage, and for thirty years 
more successfully carried on the fight. It was but a 
year or two ago since I was standing in the dark pas- 
sage where the bloody deed was done. And then I 
stood in the ancient church beside the noble tomb of 
Father William, and his long line of descendants, 
chiefs of Holland, with his motto, " / will maintain 
piety and justice ." I felt how deeply the three centuries 
that have passed have taught us all that civilisation 
owes to the founders of the Dutch nation, and to their 
great hero, whose name and fame will last, I believe 
and trust, for thrice three centuries to come. 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 



Recent Biographies of Cromwell 

A Lecture given at Princeton University 

The tercentenary of Cromwell's birth, which oc- 
curred in April, 1899, aroused fresh interest in the life 
of the great Protector, and saw the official acceptance 
of his memory as one of the national glories of Eng- 
land. Lord Rosebery, in an address worthy of him- 
self and of the occasion, rehearsed all that our country 
owes to the heroic chief of our Civil War, and set up 
at Westminster Hall the fine bronze statue of Crom- 
well, which as Prime Minister he had called on Parlia- 
ment to vote. This is one of the most impressive 
monuments in London ; and it is a curious illustra- 
tion how " the whirligig of time brings in his re- 
venges," that the effigy of the republican general is 
finally set up, after so long a struggle, beside the 
Palace of Westminster ; almost at the portal of the 
Parliament House, which he once closed and so often 
opened ; hard by the Hall where he was installed as 
Protector ; and a few yards from the tomb in which 
he was laid by the nation and from which he was torn 
by an infamous king. 

The commemoration also very naturally gave rise 
to a number of new lives and memoirs of Oliver, both 

141 



142 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

English and foreign ; which, though they may have 
established nothing new, may be said to have finally 
settled the true place of Cromwell in the history of 
England. We have had no less than three works 
from Mr. Gardiner, whose whole life has been devoted 
to the history of this age. Mr. Firth, who has worked 
on the same period for many years, published last year 
his Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in Eng- 
land. Then Mr. John Morley, in the same year, pub- 
lished his most fascinating and suggestive estimate of 
this ever memorable time. Dr. Horton and Sir Rich- 
ard Tangye had both published volumes of unqualified 
eulogy from the point of view of modern Protestant- 
ism. And in America we have had the elaborate 
history Cromwell and His Times by Samuel Harden 
Church, and the spirited study by Theodore Roose- 
velt, Vice-President of the United States. 

These various estimates differ no doubt somewhat 
in degree, and they differ much more in literary merit 
and in independent research. But they all, from vari- 
ous points of view, come to the same result. They all 
reject or ignore the pure Carlylean gospel of the su- 
preme Cromwell — an almost superhuman and quite 
infallible being, whom to doubt was blasphemy and 
whom to thwart was sin. And they all agree in regard- 
ing Cromwell, whatever his defects and his errors, as 
a statesman of profound genius and of noble character. 
Some of these writers are more severe on his faults and 
his failures, some are more ready to blame his contem- 
poraries and to expatiate on his difficulties. But in the 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL I43 

main they make his services and his merits far out- 
weigh his failures and his shortcomings. The tercen- 
tenary commemoration which saw him installed again 
at Westminster Hall in bronze, has seen him definitely 
enthroned in English literature with a chorus of honour 
— are perennius — as one of the noblest of our English 
heroes and one of the chief spirits of modern civilisation. 

No one can speak of biographies of Cromwell with- 
out beginning with the voluminous works of Mr. 
Samuel Rawson Gardiner, himself one of the descend- 
ants from Oliver. Seldom in English literature has 
any student devoted himself for a period so long and 
with such indefatigable zeal to master every shred of 
written or printed material that any language or country 
retains, and to weld these materials into the annals of 
a single epoch. From the year 1603 down to the year 
1656, that is, from the accession of James I to the 
third year of Cromwell's Protectorate, we now have, 
in seventeen massive volumes, Mr. Gardiner's history 
of England. Few periods of half a century have ever 
been recorded with such immense learning and scrupu- 
lous completeness. The " master historian of the sev- 
enteenth century," as Mr. Morley has named him, has 
raised a monument of erudition of which the only 
drawback is the difficulty it presents to the ordinary 
reader to find his way through so vast a mass of re- 
search, and the consequent loss of proportion from the 
multiplicity of detail. 

But it is in the two biographical pieces rather than 
in his history that we best find Mr. Gardiner's estimate 



144 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

of the Protector. In the voluminous history we so 
often come upon the sneers and insinuations of foreign 
diplomatists, the failure of some scheme, or the result of 
some error of judgment, that we almost begin to think 
of Oliver as the sport of circumstance, and the vacil- 
lating leader of a capricious party. When Mr. Gardi- 
ner has to sum up his view of the genius and character 
of the Protector in a small volume, we there find a 
larger estimate and a broader standard. Mr. Gardiner, 
though he is no painter of character, nor master of 
vivid narrative, has an eminently judicial mind. And, 
when he is delivering judgment, we are bound to re- 
cognise the weight of his words. The fine monograph 
which he prepared for M. Goupil's splendid quarto is 
an excellent summary of Oliver's career. And the 
sentences in which he closes the volume may be taken 
as the general verdict of posterity : — 

"The limitations on his nature — the one-sidedness of his 
religious zeal, the mistakes of his policy — are all thrust out 
of sight, and the nobility of his motives, the strength of char- 
acter, the breadth of his intellect, force themselves on the 
minds of generations for which the objects for which he strove 
have been for the most part attained, though often in a differ- 
ent fashion from that in which he placed them before himself." 

The six Oxford Lectures entitled Cromwell's Place in 
History (1897) give us a much more critical estimate. 
The sixth lecture recapitulates the whole. In it Mr. 
Gardiner tries to draw the distinction between negative 
and positive acts. " His negative work lasted," he 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL I45 

says, " his positive work vanished away." No hard 
and fast line can be drawn between negative and posi- 
tive acts of the soldier and the statesman ; and it is 
misleading to attempt to distinguish negative from 
positive work. The French Revolution, the cam- 
paign of Waterloo, the defeat of the Confederate Re- 
bellion by the United States, were peculiarly negative, 
— and yet, how fruitful in positive results ! It would 
be a paradox to say that Mirabeau, Wellington, and 
Grant left behind them no positive effects. Finally, 
to shatter the ancient regime, the tyranny of imperial- 
ism, or the consolidation of slavery, were each achieve- 
ments that led to vast and enduring changes in human 
societies. The task of Cromwell was of this order, 
and its negative or destructive side was quite as lasting 
and quite as much charged with new conditions as was 
that of these men. To destroy forever an effete polit- 
ical and social system is practically to found a new 
system. And Cromwell was the main instrument in 
destroying the effete political and social system identi- 
fied with feudalism, the Stuart monarchy, and the Laud- 
ian church. 

The Commonwealth and the Protectorate destroyed 
the Old Monarchy and the Feudal Constitution, and 
opened the way to our Liberal Institutions. Stuarts, 
intolerance, and corruption returned for a brief space, 
and in diminished force. England at the accession of 
Anne was wholly transformed from what England had 
been at the accession of Charles I. Monarchy, peer- 
age, Parliament, law, justice, toleration, finance, com- 



I46 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

merce, religion, — all stood on a new footing. This 
immense transformation was not effected by Cromwell ; 
but without him it would have been impossible. The 
Protectorate was followed by the Restoration, and 
most of its direct acts of State were annulled. Crom- 
well strove to found a presidential government, like 
that of the United States, rather than a parliamentary 
government, as understood by the Whigs. Our sub- 
sequent history was a compromise, and much of it was 
anti-Cromwellian. But it was Cromwell who, in the 
evolution of the English nation, made our subsequent 
history possible. 

" There was no single act of the Protectorate that 
was not swept away at the Restoration without hope 
of revival," says Mr. Gardiner. This is to view the 
career of Cromwell from too close a point, and through 
too small a lens. Destructive work, in statesmanship, 
provided it be permanent, is ipso facto constructive, if 
it enables the new system to form and grow. Luther, 
WicklifFe, Latimer, were destructives in theology, as 
Voltaire, Hume, and Kant were destructive in meta- 
physics ; but vast constructions have been built on the 
ground they cleared. Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charles 
the Great, William the Silent, effected memorable works 
of reconstruction. Yet the institutions laboriously 
founded by each of these perished with them ; and 
hardly one of them left anything absolutely permanent 
behind him, unless it were the city of Alexandria, the 
Julian Calendar, and the prestige of Charlemagne and 
of Orange. William the Silent's whole career was one 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 



H7 



of failure. Yet, after three centuries, the nation he 
created reveres him as its founder, and the British 
Empire is now fighting, in the Orange Free State, the 
scanty offshoot of that nation. 

That destructive statesmanship should be construc- 
tive in result requires many important conditions. 
The destruction must be necessary and timely ; it 
must be final ; it must prepare a permanent reconstruc- 
tion. The Protectorate fulfilled all these conditions. 
Although many of the Protector's schemes and ar- 
rangements disappeared with him and some of them 
before him, they were ultimately succeeded by institu- 
tions of a similar order and having a like purpose, 
which never could have been founded at all had not 
Cromwell's reforms and experiments preceded them. 
Like William the Silent, Cromwell failed at times be- 
cause he was in advance of his age, especially in the 
matter of religious equality, official competence, law 
reform, and the proper spheres of Parliament and 
Executive. Had Cromwell had his way he would 
have made the political system of England akin to 
that of the United States. The parliamentary system 
of government was not established in England for 
more than a century after Cromwell's time. It is not 
at all clear that it is destined to endure in the spirit of 
Pitt, Peel, and Gladstone ; and it certainly has not 
been an unmixed boon. 

It is, I think, a signal error of judgment which led 
Mr. Gardiner finally to pronounce on " the failure of 
Cromwell's ideas." His institutions and his construe- 



I48 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

tive schemes were undoubtedly recast. But his ideas 
— the best of his ideas — lived and developed. Mr. 
Gardiner himself seems to feel this when he says 
" that many, if not all, the experiments of the Com- 
monwealth were but premature anticipations of the 
legislation of the nineteenth century." Surely, this 
is one of the strongest proofs of life, that ideas had 
borne fruit after two centuries. Mr. Firth states a 
precisely contrary view to Mr. Gardiner when he says : 
" The ideas which inspired Cromwell's policy exerted 
a lasting influence on the development of the English 
state. Thirty years after his death the religious liberty 
for which he fought was established by law." " No 
English ruler did more to shape the future of the land 
he governed." To ignore all this, as Mr. Gardiner 
does, is the nemesis of devoting a lifetime to the 
minute study of a single half century. 

Let us turn to the wonderfully interesting and sug- 
gestive volume of Mr. John Morley. Its unique value 
consists in this, that Mr. Morley is the only one of 
the biographers of Cromwell who is himself a states- 
man and has served the State in critical affairs and re- 
sponsible office. He is a man who has had to deal 
with some of the very problems that tried Oliver's 
mind — both ecclesiastical and temporal — parliamen- 
tary, educational, and Irish. The most philosophical 
historians have ever been men who have had practical 
experience of government, as were Thucydides, Tacitus, 
Machiavelli, Comines, Bacon, Clarendon, Gibbon, and 
Macaulay. We must now add the name of John 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 1 49 

Morley to that of the statesmen historians, and his 
book to the list of the philosophical histories. 

His volume has also another distinction, almost 
equally important, that of rare literary art, a distinction 
which he shares with Carlyle himself. It is full of 
subtle suggestions in political problems and of weighty 
pronouncements of political experience. It is this 
which distinguishes the book from that of Carlyle, to 
whom political experience was a sort of penal servitude, 
who solved every political problem with a Gargantuan 
trope or a resonant gibe. Mr. Morley 's work is far 
wider in range than Mr. Carlyle's, who paints Crom- 
well as a being such as Cassius in sarcasm represented 
Julius : — 

" Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world 
Like a Colossus ; and we petty men 
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about 
To find ourselves dishonourable graves." 

When Carlyle has to mention contemporary soldiers 
or politicians, they only walk under the huge legs of 
Oliver. To Mr. Morley they are all very real and 
active personages in the great drama. He gives us, 
as Clarendon did, a gallery of portraits of the men of 
the time. 

This undoubtedly lessens the effect of the book 
viewed simply as a biography or portrait of Oliver. 
These speaking likenesses of warriors and politicians, 
this lucid unravelling of the conflicting forces in the 
great melee of the Civil Wars, somewhat disturb our 



150 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

contemplation of the presiding genius, and rather dis- 
tract our attention from his directing influence and 
mastery. The book is entitled simply, Oliver Crom- 
well, but that is hardly accurate as a description. It 
is much more a history of the times wherein Oliver 
lived and worked than a biography of the man himself. 
Or rather, since five hundred pages cannot contain the 
history of such a half century, it is a series of brilliant 
appreciations of the typical events and men of the 
Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate. In 
such chapters as II, III, and IV, Cromwell is very 
little on the stage, which is held by other actors of 
signal power and interest. We gain by having a great 
variety of scenes and a moving catalogue of dramatis 
■persona. But Cromwell loses by being presented 
amongst men who claim to be his equals and some- 
times his superiors, and by not being at all consistently 
the hero of the piece. And this doubtless was to 
some extent Mr. Morley's own purpose and judgment. 
But perhaps the effect on the reader's mind may go 
farther than he designed. 

I think we shall not be wrong in assuming Mr. 
Morley to estimate Cromwell, not only without any of 
Carlyle's unmixed adoration, but on a lower plane 
than Mr. Firth, and also perhaps Mr. Gardiner. 
Mr. Morley is enough of a philosopher to take a 
warm interest in Strafford, so much so that the drama 
opens with the great Minister playing some such part 
as Satan does in the opening of Paradise Lost. " He 
has as true a concern for order and the public service 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 151 

as Pym or Oliver," says Mr. Morley. Mr. Morley 
has a saving word for Laud, and will not allow that he 
was either the simpleton or the bigot that Macaulay 
pronounces him to be. But of all the men who 
figure in that great parliamentary crisis, Mr. Morley's 
favourite is — and most justly is — John Pym. In 
fact, a careless reader, who took up the book in haste, 
might think Pym was the leading spirit of the rebellion. 
And it is perhaps true that, in the matter of sympathy, 
Mr. Morley's heart goes out to Pym and not to 
Oliver. 

As a loyal Cromwellian myself, I am not content with 
this estimate, which seems to me to carry the reaction 
against Carlyle's idolatry to unjust lengths. As Mr. 
Gardiner is inclined to minimise the permanent results 
of Cromwell's career by keeping his eye too closely 
fixed on the immediate future and the Restoration of 
Charles, so Mr. Morley is inclined to overemphasise 
Cromwell's unconstitutional policy, owing to his own 
excessive respect for Parliament and parliamentary 
methods. Mr. Gladstone once told me that he did not 
consider Cromwell so great a man as the late Lord Al- 
thorp, who was Mr. Gladstone's ideal of a successful 
leader of the House of Commons. Men whose lives 
are passed in the atmosphere of Parliament imbibe a su- 
perstitious reverence for oratorical battles and triumphs 
which often have little reference to the real history of 
the nation. And I cannot help fancying that Mr. 
Morley has caught something of Mr. Gladstone's dis- 
belief in the greatness of a revolutionary dictator who 



152 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

was far from being a parliamentary success, but whose 
true greatness was that he lived in a higher plane than 
that of any Parliament. 

The "prologue" to Mr. Morley's book (pp. 1-6) 
contains some of the finest passages that even Mr. 
Morley has added to English literature, and not a few 
of those Tacitean judgments on men and affairs which 
are his peculiar note. And in the " epilogue " (pp. 
488-496) we have again more of these eloquent 
phrases and verdicts. I cannot wholly assent to all of 
these. The key-note of them is this : that Crom- 
well's essential claim to greatness is that of a soldier 
who won victories, that his political action was a series 
of mistakes, and that where force was useless he failed. 
Oliver, according to Mr. Morley, was the soldier of 
the great English Revolution, and not its chief. For 
my part I cannot quite accept all this, and Mr. Morley 
himself presently uses language that is hardly con- 
sistent. He speaks of " Oliver's largeness of aim ; his 
freedom of spirit, and the energy that comes of a free 
spirit ; the presence of a burning light in his mind ; 
his good faith, his valour, his constancy," — these, he 
thinks, have stamped his name on the imagination of 
men over all the vast area of the civilised world. Pre- 
cisely so, but these are not the qualities by which the 
mere soldier is remembered. As one who knew him 
said, " a larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of 
clay." It is this which so deeply impressed his con- 
temporaries and made him the genius of the English 
Revolution. 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 1 53 

It was not only this heroic nature, this largeness of 
mind, this burning light in his mind (expressions that 
we should not use of Wellington or Nelson) which 
raise Cromwell so far above the mere warrior, but it 
is his political genius and his resolute statesmanship 
that are his true glory. Perhaps the most marvellous 
part of his career is this, that, after all the fighting and 
confusion of the Civil Wars and the overthrow of Par- 
liament and monarchy, England enjoyed for nearly 
ten years after Worcester, internal peace and order, 
without disturbance or revolution. To tell us that 
the man who secured this result, so marvellous when 
we consider what revolutions and civil wars mean, was 
not a statesman of commanding power, is surely a 
paradox. True, the institutions of the Protectorate 
perished in form, but not a few of them lived in spirit. 
As Mr. Gardiner says, these "experiments" were 
" anticipations of subsequent legislation." True, the 
great ideas of Oliver and his heroic experiments 
toward civil honesty and religious toleration were 
carried out one or two generations later by other men, 
and by parties who owed no allegiance to him. But 
that is the way with the slow evolution of social and 
religious reform. We might as well contend that 
Julius did not lay the foundations of the Roman Em- 
pire, nor Charles lay the foundations of mediaeval 
Europe, nor William the Silent lay the foundations of 
Dutch independence. If Cromwell was a mere sol- 
dier, so were Julius, Charles, and Orange — who left 
nothing solid behind them. 



154 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

Mr. Morley says very truly, " To ignore the Restora- 
tion is to misjudge the Rebellion." That is true 
enough if we narrow the Civil War and the Common- 
wealth down to a mere rebellion. But to ignore the 
deposition of the Stuarts and the resettlement of 1689 
is to misjudge the English Revolution as a whole. 
And that is far more serious error than to misjudge 
the " Rebellion." The English Revolution which 
began in 1629 lasted at least for a century — as revo- 
lutions usually do. The Long Parliament, the Civil 
Wars, the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, the Res- 
toration, the so-called "revolution" of 1689, the 
Hanoverian settlement, were all phases of it ; but the 
Commonwealth and Protectorate were the decisive acts 
of it, without which the Long Parliament and the 
crowning mercies of Naseby and Worcester and the 
rest would have proved mere incidental rebellions. It 
is by fixing the eye too closely to the period from 
1642 to 1662 that Mr. Morley, like Mr. Gardiner, 
somewhat loses sight of Cromwell's permanent work. 
If we look at the whole period, from the accession of 
Charles I to the time of Walpole, and regard it as 
one prolonged revolution, we may almost think Crom- 
well's share in the great' evolution of English society 
was the only really dominant fact. 

It is part of the same view that leads Mr. Morley 
to regard " Cromwell's revolution as the end of the 
mediaeval, rather than the beginning of the modern 
era." If this be so, cadit quastio — then Cromwell 
was nothing but a noble soldier. But here, again, one 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 1 55 

may ask : Was Julius's dictatorship the end of the re- 
public, rather than the beginning of the empire ? 
Was Charlemagne's reign the end of the barbaric in- 
vasions, or the beginning of feudal settlement ? Was 
William's achievement the expulsion of the Spaniards 
from the Netherlands, or the beginning of Dutch inde- 
pendence ? It is true that the Civil Wars and the 
Long Parliament ended the feudal regime in England. 
But Cromwell's entire bearing as general, as admin- 
istrator, as protector, and as legislator, was essentially 
and utterly modern, inspired with modern ideas of 
honest law, social quality, capacity in lieu of birth, le- 
gality in lieu of privilege, religious freedom, and un- 
limited toleration for all serious opinions. Oliver, it 
is true, had little of the parliamentary leader, and 
nothing of the conventional democrat, but he was as 
much a man with modern ideas of progress as Walpole, 
Peel, or Gladstone. 

In venturing to ask if Mr. Morley has quite done 
justice to my favourite hero, I speak with all the 
diffidence of a disciple who questions his master, and 
with a sense that this masterly portrait drawn by Mr. 
Morley accords in the main with that of Mr. Gardiner, 
who is far the greatest living authority on the period. 
It seems also to have satisfied another eminent historian, 
Dr. T. Hodgkin, who in the fifth, or February, number 
of the Monthly Review (p. 82), has published a sym- 
pathetic notice of Mr. Morley's book. Dr. Hodgkin 
incidentally takes up a point whereon Mr. Gardiner 
has condemned the judgment of Cromwell, in allying 



I56 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

himself with France rather than Spain. Mr. Morley 
would seem to follow Gardiner in regarding the alli- 
ance with Mazarin as short-sighted policy in an 
English statesman. Dr. Hodgkin points out that the 
contemporary judgment of European diplomatists, and 
even of the acute delegates of Venice, was that the vast 
power of Spain was a greater menace to European 
peace and freedom than was that of France. Forty 
years later France was preponderant. But, as Dr. 
Hodgkin truly says, and Mr. Firth agrees with him, 
a practical statesman, dealing with the facts of the 
hour, could hardly be expected to foresee so distant 
and speculative a result. 

Mr. Charles Firth, of Balliol College, Oxford, is an 
authority on the Civil Wars only second to Mr. 
Gardiner. He prepared the Life of Cromwell and of 
so many of the leaders of that age for the Dictionary of 
National Biography , and his edition of the Clarke Papers 
and Essays for the Royal Historical Society are known 
to all students of the seventeenth century. His 
Oliver Cromwell (Putnam's Sons, 1900) is the view of 
the Protector which best satisfies me. It is a full and 
detailed narrative of Cromwell's entire career based on 
exhaustive research into all the original sources. It is 
more complete than Mr. Gardiner's Oliver Cromwell 
(4to, 1899) — the history not yet being completed — 
and it is more strictly a biography of Cromwell than 
is the wide-ranging work of Mr. Morley. I cannot 
withhold my conviction that Mr. Firth altogether 
judges Cromwell's true work more justly than either 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 157 

Gardiner or Morley, whilst he agrees almost entirely 
with their estimate of Cromwell's character and genius. 

Mr. Firth supports Gardiner and Morley in reject- 
ing Carlyle's ideal of the divinely inspired hero ; he 
agrees with them in regarding Oliver as a consummate 
soldier and a conscientious and lofty spirit. But Mr. 
Firth sees in him also the great statesman and the 
founder of much in our modern history. Both as 
soldier and as statesman, he says, Cromwell was greater 
than any Englishman of his time ; and we must look 
to Csesar or Napoleon for a parallel to such an union 
of high political and military ability in one man. Mr. 
Firth could hardly rate higher than does Mr. Morley 
Cromwell's marvellous power as a soldier, and this is the 
more interesting from Mr. Firth's intimate knowledge 
of the personnel and constitution of the Ironsides army. 
And he rightly insists on the cardinal point that Crom- 
well, a middle-aged civilian, created the instrument 
with which he achieved his victories, and " out of the 
military chaos which existed when the war began he 
organised the force which made Puritanism victo- 
rious." 

But it is not as a mere soldier that Mr. Firth con- 
siders Cromwell. He rightly does justice to his power 
as a statesman, even as a constructive statesman who 
has left permanent results in our history. Mr. Firth 
enlarges on Oliver's social and political reforms with 
more fulness and sympathy than either Gardiner or 
Morley. In his seventeenth chapter Mr. Firth ex- 
plains the eighty-two ordinances of 1 653-1 654, nearly 



I58 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

all of which were confirmed by the Parliament of 1656. 
It is true that all the laws of the Protectorate were 
annulled at the Restoration ; but they are nearly all 
now parts of our daily life. The relief of poor pris- 
oners, the maintenance of highways, the reorganisation 
of the Treasury, the settlement of Ireland and of Scot- 
land, the union of the three kingdoms, — these are 
some of the subjects of legislation. Surely, these are 
not mediaeval, but modern, reforms, and testify to 
Cromwell's "faith in Progress," in which Mr. Morley 
holds him deficient. On three sets of ordinances Mr. 
Firth enlarges — reform of the law, reformation of 
manners, and reorganisation of the Church. 

Cromwell in truth made heroic efforts for a sweep- 
ing reform of the law, both civil and criminal. He 
did this, not of his own motion, but by giving a free 
hand to Sir Matthew Hale and other eminent lawyers. 
The reform of Chancery was established in 1 654-1 656, 
and was the basis of subsequent reorganisation of that 
court. Cromwell's noble protest against the bloody 
code of the criminal law was not finally ratified until 
the nineteenth century. But the abolition of the feudal 
tenures and the mediaeval land law was confirmed at 
the Restoration, and has never been set aside. Alto- 
gether the Commonwealth and the Protectorate form 
one of the most important epochs in the history of 
our law reform. 

A very competent lawyer, Mr. F. A. Inderwick, K. 
C, has traced this step by step in his book, The Inter- 
regnum (1648-1660). As he shows, it was "the foun- 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 1 59 

dation to a great extent of our present system." The 
suppression of duelling, the establishment of a letter 
post, the consolidation of highway acts, acts against 
adultery and the forcible abduction of women, — are 
not of supreme importance, but at least they testify to 
the modern, not the mediaeval, spirit of Cromwell's 
government. Other great reforms were the restoration 
of the English language to courts of justice and the 
suppression of the antiquated Norman jargon, the sim- 
plification of pleading, and the abolition of fees to 
judges and their officers. But the great object of 
all law reform was, as it has ever been, the Court of 
Chancery ; and, in this perennial struggle between 
tradition and common sense, no effort has been more 
determined than that of the Protector. 

The efforts made by Cromwell and his Parliament 
for the reformation of manners, against cruel sports, 
duelling, immorality, swearing, drunkenness, and gam- 
bling, may have exceeded the public opinion of that 
age, indeed, of our age. But it ill becomes us to say 
that they were wholly devoid of permanent effect in 
that they were swept away by a profligate Restoration, 
if the progress of civilisation has at length put an 
end to their worst excesses. The reorganisation of 
the Church lay at the heart of Oliver, and in dealing 
with this Augean stable, his good work was natu- 
rally destroyed when an obscene Monarchy recalled 
a persecuting Prelacy. His valiant efforts to protect 
Catholics, Quakers, and Jews from proscription needed 
centuries to be fulfilled in deeds. But, as Mr. Firth 



l60 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

says : " Cromwell's ecclesiastical system passed away 
with its author, but no man exerted more influence 
on the religious development of England. Thanks 
to him, Nonconformity had time to take root and to 
grow so strong in England that the storm which fol- 
lowed the Restoration had no power to root it up." 

Mr. Firth is not at all satisfied that Cromwell's for- 
eign policy was wholly mistaken and abortive. He 
says, " It was in part a failure, but only in part." Of 
the three dominant ideas of that policy, — (i) to up- 
hold the Protestant faith, (2) to extend English trade, 
(3) to prevent foreign intervention in England, — the 
first only was misconceived and without signal result, 
the other two objects were triumphantly successful. 
Cromwell, as Gardiner has shown us, misunderstood 
many things, and was far too sanguine of possible 
good, in the complicated imbroglio of European diplo- 
macy. But Mr. Firth rightly does justice to the gran- 
deur of his conception, and takes due account of the 
difficulties of the situation and the prejudices of the 
age and school in which he was reared. What Eng- 
lish statesman from Cardinal Wolsey, Queen Elizabeth, 
down to Chatham, Pitt, Palmerston, and Gladstone, 
has not misunderstood the play of European forces, 
and failed in many of his cherished adventures ? 

Cromwell's colonial policy, Mr. Firth finds, was a 
greater success. He was "the first English ruler who 
systematically employed the power of the government 
to increase and extend the colonial possession of Eng- 
land." It was during the Protectorate that the nas- 



RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL l6l 

cent colonies were consolidated into what may be called 
the nucleus of the Empire. In spite of the disastrous 
attack on Hispaniola, the capture of Jamaica laid the 
foundation of the British West Indies, which was the 
most fruitful part of his external policy, and produced 
the most abiding results. Cromwell is certainly the 
first systematic founder of British Imperialism ; and he 
is honoured or denounced as such by the two parties 
which approve or regret that growth of the United 
Kingdom. But it is hard to doubt that the man who, 
for the first time, held in so firm a hand the three king- 
doms, and who laid the foundations of the Empire 
across the seas, left solid and permanent effects on the 
history of our country. 

The " institutions " which Cromwell designed were 
undoubtedly swept away by that flooded sewer we call 
the " Restoration " ; but Cromwell never intended 
them to be permanent. He knew perfectly well that 
they were a temporary stop-gap, designed to give 
an epoch of calm and recovery to the storm-tossed 
land. He made no attempt to found a dynasty, or to 
resettle the Constitution. He spoke of himself as a 
constable put in power to keep order, to stem the 
tide of anarchy, and prevent return of the Stuart mon- 
archy. These things he achieved whilst his life lasted, 
and for two years after his death. His great ideas, 
which he had attempted to plant, — liberty of con- 
science, final breach with absolute monarchy and feudal 
aristocracy, union of the three kingdoms, mastery of 
the seas, extension of trade, legal reform, and a colonial 



1 62 RECENT BIOGRAPHIES OF CROMWELL 

empire, — were all made permanent bases of English 
policy by his successors within the next generation, or 
at most the next hundred years. 

In a fine peroration Mr. Firth has summed up his 
estimate of this work : — 

" So the Protector's institutions perished with him and his 
work ended in apparent failure. Yet he had achieved great 
things. Thanks to his sword, absolute monarchy failed to take 
root in English soil. Thanks to his sword, Great Britain 
emerged from the chaos of the Civil Wars one strong state in- 
stead of three separate and hostile communities. Nor were 
the results of his action entirely negative. The ideas which 
inspired his policy exerted a lasting influence on the develop- 
ment of the English state. Thirty years after his death the 
religious liberty for which he fought was established by law. 
The union with Scotland and Ireland, which the statesmen 
of the Restoration undid, the statesmen of the eighteenth cen- 
tury effected. The mastery of the seas he had desired to gain 
and the Greater Britain he had sought to build up became 
sober realities. Thus others perfected the work which he 
had designed and attempted. No English ruler did more to 
shape the future of the land he governed." 

This I hold to be the real Cromwell — the truth 
about the work of the Protector. And it seems to me 
a paradox to call this work "negative," or to deny that 
he left a permanent reconstruction on the face of his 
country. 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 



Republicanism and Democracy 

A Lecture delivered to the Political Education League of 

New York 

Society is a living organism — an infinitely complex 
organic system of mutually correlated organs, indispen- 
sable to each other, and having really no independent 
life. Human nature is not a bundle of sticks or a 
sack of potatoes. It is a living body; and it can no 
more be truly separated into parts than a living man 
can be separated into a digestive apparatus and a ner- 
vous system. 

Society is an organism, and it must be treated as a 
whole. The elements of society {i.e. of humanity) 
can be separated only in thought, not in fact. The 
State, the Church, Law, Public Opinion, Economics, 
Ethics, are subjects which we may reason about sepa- 
rately, and detach in the abstract. But for all pur- 
poses of concrete application we must consider them 
as depending one on each other. 

Now the popular social and political schemes treat 
society piecemeal, in arbitrary sections. They study 
society in analytic groups, and then they begin to act 
as if these groups were separable factors. It is as 
though physicians and surgeons, after studying the 

165 



1 66 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

physical organism, first as skeleton, then as nervous 
and digestive apparatus, then as a circulating system, 
were to begin to treat any one of them by itself, as 
if bone, heart, or brain could be treated by drugs or 
instruments apart from the rest of the body, and with- 
out reference to any reaction such treatment might 
cause elsewhere. The socialist, the communist, the 
cooperator, the democratic reformer, the land re- 
former, the suffrage reformer, the temperance or 
sex agitation, confine themselves to one definite ele- 
ment or capacity in human nature, and go for their 
own particular remedy without any regard for the 
rest of the social organism. 

I can only deal with these great social problems 
from my own point of view. And I have been trained 
in the Positivist school on the principles of Auguste 
Comte. Now the Positivist scheme, true to its uni- 
formly synthetic character, treats society organically. 
Every one of the institutions, methods, doctrines, it 
puts forward has to be viewed with reference to every 
other. It is an attempt to restore health to the body 
politic by a comprehensive treatment of the whole 
constitution, and not by applying local remedies to 
particular parts or organs. This proviso should pre- 
vent many objections which are made by hasty critics. 
They estimate the Positive synthesis, bit by bit, in 
the light of their own analytic notions, quite over- 
looking the truth that each institution and doctrine 
in any really synthetic scheme implies the rest. And 
underlying all is the institution of a strong and active 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 67 

public opinion, resting on an organised education, 
moral as well as intellectual, common to all, and modi- 
fying habits and all forces. Without this vigorous 
public opinion, all social and political schemes are little 
more than nostrums. Having this public opinion to 
moralise the whole social organism, the weaknesses of 
institutions may be corrected and supplemented. All 
institutions and political devices need this. 

Try the effect of a right moral education in the 
world, before you seek to pull things to pieces by 
legal and practical revolutions. Thus, when we reject 
communism as the solution of the industrial problem, 
we propose as the basis of an industrial society amoral 
(not a material) socialism. That is to say, we propose 
to obtain the end by transforming opinions and habits, 
and not by violently revolutionising social institutions. 
But how are we to transform opinions and habits, the 
communist asks ? By forming, we reply, a new public 
opinion, by a complete education, by an educating body, 
by a religion of duty. 

But we also presuppose, as an antecedent condition 
of such public opinion, a transformed State, one in 
which the workman is guaranteed all that the State can 
give to improve his material condition without injuring 
the rest of the community ; secondly, a real republic, 
that is, a State wherein the ultimate power rests with 
the body of the people. By republic we mean a 
commonwealth resting on the will and devoted to the 
interests of all citizens alike; having these three 
qualities — (i) repudiating all hereditary functions or 



1 68 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

privileges, (2) renouncing all class exclusions, (3) re- 
cognising no property in any public thing. A repub- 
lic is a commonwealth where the whole common force 
is directed to the welfare of all citizens equally, as its 
raison d'etre. This is the normal and only permanent 
form of the body politic in advanced civilised com- 
munities of free citizens. 

This republican type is practically, but imperfectly 
and irregularly, realised in England. In form, but in 
little more than form, we retain a monarchy, which 
an acute and conservative observer described as the 
"theatric," or show part, of the British Constitution. 
The monarchy preserves certain traditional features of 
England, exerts a steady and uniform pressure to keep 
society in an organic form, and at times no doubt 
serves certain useful purposes. But we know that in 
all the larger things, and directly the nation is roused 
and has a will of its own, the throne becomes a mere 
symbol, without the smallest power even of retarding 
a definite policy. 

The other obstacle to the republican type is the 
existence of a hereditary chamber, which under the 
growth of democracy in the Lower House is becom- 
ing perhaps more powerful as a resisting force than 
it has been for the last sixty years. An heredi- 
tary chamber is obviously irreconcilable with any re- 
publican principle ; and when this chamber is, in the 
theory of the Constitution, the equal of the elected 
chamber, and under given conditions is able for a time 
to make its equality felt, it becomes a very serious 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 69 

source of disturbance and embarrassment. Still, since 
it is admitted that the resistance of the Upper House 
is a purely temporary one, that its action is dilatory 
only, that it has no originating power to force on the 
country any policy of its own ; since it becomes a 
merely formal registering body whenever a conserva- 
tive majority exists in the elective chamber; and since 
it can never under any circumstances interfere in any- 
thing touching finance and expenditure, — it must be 
taken that the House of Lords has an indirect and re- 
tarding effect on the body politic, but not a decisive 
or dominant effect. Both monarchy and House of 
Lords, from time to time, affect English political de- 
velopment for evil, especially the second ; but neither 
of them separately, nor even both together, neutralise 
the principle that England is a republic, a democratic 
republic, modified by powerful aristocratic and monar- 
chic institutions. The republican type is fully realised 
in the United States, in Switzerland, and practically 
in many of the smaller states of Europe, such as Greece, 
Norway, Holland, Denmark, even though all of these 
retain a ceremonial monarchy, and it is essentially but 
not completely realised in France. A typical republic 
implies the complete extinction of all hereditary insti- 
tutions, of class manners, and of all privileged orders, 
or churches, and France retains all of these things, 
though in very vanishing form. The United States 
and Switzerland are as yet the only complete types of 
the pure republic ; though many persons will think 
that the unscrupulous power of wealth in America, and 



I7O REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

the low inorganic condition of social life in Switzerland, 
present evils as bad as the aristocratic institutions of 
England, if not worse. 

The Positive synthesis, to begin at the beginning, 
is hostile to every proposal for aggrandising the State, 
whether of the imperial or the communistic type. 
As it trusts the main influence in the moral and spir- 
itual sphere to education, so it would commit the main 
work in the political sphere to public opinion. As in 
the moral world the problem is to organise education, 
so in the political sphere the main problem is to or- 
ganise public opinion. If we could accomplish that, 
all the schemes for increasing the power of the State 
may be reduced to a minimum. Positivism has care- 
fully considered the mode of organising public opin- 
ion, in the first place by providing for the people a 
common education of a high and complete sort; next, 
by greatly increasing the leisure of the people by re- 
duced hours of labour and constant holidays ; thirdly, 
by the regular institution and immense increase of 
workmen's clubs and meetings for political discussion ; 
fourthly, by the wholly new institution of requiring 
public appointments to be submitted to the test of 
public approval ; and lastly, by guaranteeing, as a social 
and religious institution, complete freedom of speech. 
With this, the form of government would become a 
thing of minor importance. 

We are all so saturated with ideas of parliamentary 
government that we do not easily imagine any other 
as possible. Parliamentary government in England 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY I 7 I 

is quite a special national product, apparently innate in 
the British race, and indigenous in our own peculiar 
social type. I am not prepared to deny that it may 
continue for many generations to work under a revised 
form in Britain ; but it seems quite unfit for France 
and most other countries of Europe, and to be rather 
a scandalous parody even in the United States. From 
the point of view of sociology and of human society, 
we could not regard what is an anomaly in the British 
island as a normal type. So that what we say as to 
parliamentary institutions may require some modifica- 
tion when applied to this country. 

Comte proposed to retain (for the present) a Parlia- 
ment elected by universal suffrage with complete con- 
trol over the expenditure, but not directly charged 
with administrative functions. For the effective con- 
trol over the executive government he would rely far 
more upon public opinion than on Parliament. And 
that is what we are now coming to do. Parliamentary 
government still retains a vast power over the imagi- 
nation and even over the affections of Englishmen, 
because it really represents to us the republic ; it 
represents the People and Progress in the great strug- 
gle with Monarchy and Feudalism. To us, Parlia- 
ment is the only instrument whereby a despotic 
executive has been curbed and shorn of its intoler- 
ance. Its glory is that it has been the moderating and 
humanising force of our monarchy. But now that 
the monarchy is a shadow, and Parliament has no 
function as a counterpoise, and the two Houses of 



I72 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

Parliament are now balanced in such a way as to pro- 
duce a chronic deadlock, men are seriously asking 
themselves if Parliament deserves this regard and affec- 
tion. What is there to show to-day that Parliament 
is the normal executive organ for an advanced repub- 
lic ? Do we see it to be so in the United States, or 
in France ? On the contrary, in the only great and 
complete republics we have seen for the last two 
generations, the tendency of Parliament elected by 
universal suffrage is to make a stable and vigorous 
executive impossible, and that whilst failing to pass 
any sound system of industrial and social legislation. 
Like every other system devised and perfected to act 
as a check and a counterpoise on tyranny, parliaments 
are impotent in the ordinary course as positive organs 
of progressive government. 

Parliamentary government is not truly republican 
except in great revolutionary crises, when it may be- 
come for a time a mighty engine of reform. The Eng- 
lish Long Parliament of 1640, the English Convention 
of 1689, the first American Congress, the French 
States-General and Convention, our Reformed Parlia- 
ment of 1832, did tremendous work of a revolutionary 
sort. But when Parliament settles into a mere insti- 
tution, especially when it undertakes the administrative 
machinery of a vast aggregate of states, it soon ceases 
to be either truly republican, or really practical. In 
the first place, it passes largely into the hands of the 
rich, or of those who are seeking to become rich, or 
who are the creatures of the rich — as we see in Eng- 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 73 

land, in France, in the United States. Secondly, it 
passes under the control of the professional debaters, 
whether lawyers, journalists, or office-seekers, whose 
eloquence and activity is as little inspired by the wel- 
fare of the republic as that of an Old Bailey advocate 
is by the virtue of his client in the dock. Under the 
combined influence of the ambitious men of wealth, 
and of the professional men of the tongue, Parliaments 
too often sway backward and forward, doing nothing 
but debate and rearrange ministries, retarding, obscur- 
ing, and falsifying public opinion. 

Parliament, in our country within the last two cen- 
turies and particularly within the last two generations, 
has completely changed its original character and func- 
tion without any definite change in the Constitution, 
or any formal authority for the change. We still call 
it the legislature ; but it is much more of a huge ex- 
ecutive committee than a legislature. It passes new 
laws very slowly and occasionally ; its financial busi- 
ness is settled in a few nights, often without any seri- 
ous examination. But it devotes violent and prolonged 
debates to very small executive details, and brings the 
conduct of the State at last to something rather like 
government by public meeting. A common legal pro- 
ceeding in Connemara or Shetland, the act of an official 
in British Columbia or on the banks of the Nyanza, are 
equally the subject for vehement debates. Is Parlia- 
ment a consultative body, a ratifying body, or a law- 
making body — an initiative or a court of appeal ? Is 
it a legislature, or is it an executive ? It claims to 



J74 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 



be, and acts as if it were all of these at the same time 
and much more, as if it were kings, Lords, Com- 
mons, public meeting, High Court of Justice, inter- 
national arbitrator, the grand official journal, and 
controller of all public officials, great and small, from 
a lord chancellor to a doorkeeper. 

It is difficult to see how Parliament is to be at the 
same time a legislature and also an executive — for 
the body which controls, cross-examines, and modifies 
the executive, day by day, is the executive. The diffi- 
culty about a Parliament being the real Executive 
arises when Parliament is not homogeneous. In Eng- 
land at times the two Houses are in direct and system- 
atic conflict. Then the plan is for the large minority 
in the Lower House, leagued with the conservative 
majority in the Upper Flouse, to make legislation 
impossible and executive government as difficult as 
possible. Whilst the House of Lords remains un- 
touched, that state of things is certain to continue ; 
and it is difficult to see how popular legislation or a 
really democratic party can succeed, without some con- 
stitutional change. In the meantime, Parliament, 
divided against itself, is neither legislature nor execu- 
tive in any active and free sense. 

The legislative function of Parliament is not a 
reality, so long as nine-tenths of the hereditary House 
decline to attend, to listen, to consider, or to under- 
stand the points under debate, and yet have an equal 
voice in all legislation with the elected representatives 
of six millions. The executive functions of Parliament 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 75 

can only be exercised for harm, so long as every petty 
administrative act or order is liable to be debated by a 
miscellaneous crowd of 680 talkers, many of them 
ignorant, ill-informed, unscrupulous, and eager, not to 
do what is right, but to win credit for themselves and 
bring discredit on their rivals. Such is the ignoble 
end to which the mother of free Parliament seems too 
often to descend. 

There is a great deal of solemn cant still pervading 
our superstitious reverence for parliamentary govern- 
ment. What does it mean ? Parliamentary govern- 
ment means, literally, government by a talking assembly. 
But the real deliberative and critical assembly of the 
nation is a much larger and freer thing. It is the 
nation itself, quite as well informed of the facts as 
the M.P.'s, and meeting in ten thousand unofficial 
parliaments by day and night. The deliberative 
functions of Parliament are now quite superseded by 
public opinion; and the House of Commons is a very 
belated, imperfect, and often perverse representative 
of public opinion. It is easily converted into a retro- 
grade and retarding force, as we often see in some 
scheme of social reform, which all parties in Parliament 
profess themselves anxious to pass, the principle and 
general lines of which have been heartily accepted by 
an overwhelming weight of public opinion, almost 
without any definite difference of purpose, — but which 
is still adjourned from year to year. 

There is much more to be said for the doctrine of 
pure democracy — as now practised under the referen- 



I76 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

dum — the direct vote on a definite measure of the 
entire body of citizens. But a pure democracy of the 
Athenian type cannot be worked except in such a 
small community as that which met on the Pnyx, 
where the bulk of the active citizens in the state could 
all be assembled within the hearing of one man's voice. 
And the referendum — or direct vote — is only possible 
where the vote taken is a bare Yes, or No ; the mere 
acceptance of a particular law, measure, or minister. 
No modification, qualification, or other variation is 
possible under any system of referendum or other 
type of direct democratic vote. Government cannot 
be carried on by crowds, or in crowds. A House of 
680 members, coming and going, intriguing and group- 
ing anew day by day, has some of the worst faults of 
a crowd. 

The arguments for pure democratic government, for 
reaching directly the whole body of citizens, are all 
negative. They aim at getting rid of some evil ; they 
do not pretend to claim any direct advantage. They 
appeal to the sentiments of jealousy, self-interest, and 
self-assertion. Their sole claim is to neutralise the 
effect of aristocratic or monarchic pressure. The 
most daring publicist has not ventured to assert that 
pure democracy, or the direct intervention of all in 
government, is per se the best method of obtaining 
efficient government. He only prefers it as a mode 
of preventing the people being forced to submit to 
what they hate, and plundered by those whom they 
cannot resist. The pure democratic principle was de- 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 77 

signed to combat gross abuses, ancient institutions, 
and rank superstitions. It has often served this end 
with striking success. 

But the whole problem is transposed by the Positive 
scheme which would take from government its power 
for evil, and strengthen the people by a new organiza- 
tion of public opinion. Real republican sentiment 
is accomplished by this better than by any conceivable 
reform of the franchise or system of checks. 

The first condition is a strict limitation of the sphere 
of government. 

i. The chief and foremost limitation is to reduce the 
military function to pure defence. No one can pretend 
that this is possible at this hour. We are not here dis- 
cussing what any President here, or any ministry in our 
country, are likely to do about the army and the navy. 
We are looking forward to a time when industry, not 
empire, shall be the end of human ambition and the 
desire of true patriotism. Standing armies might then 
be replaced by such an adequate militia, of which 
we already have types in the Swiss and the American 
republics. There, no doubt under very special geo- 
graphical conditions, but conditions totally different, a 
free and proud people have organised a militia amply 
adequate to protect their independence, at a minimum 
drain on the freedom of the population, and a minimum 
of expenditure on the taxes of the country. At least 
this was true in the United States down to the war 
with Spain. Their scientific services, their staff, and 
in the case of Switzerland, their military organisation 



I78 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

and powers of mobilisation, are judged by experts to 
be ample for mere defence, and no other object can 
ever cross the mind of a Swiss. Wild as it sounds to- 
day, the day is at hand when Europe may abolish its 
huge armaments, renounce all military habits and pre- 
judices ; and having paid off their vast debts, the sinis- 
ter inheritance from past wars, at one stroke reduce 
the national expenditure by one-third, or even one- 
half. 

1. Next, of course, these vast aggregate empires 
must disappear. They are all the creation of war, they 
all exist only by chronic war, or preparation for war ; and 
they all mean oppression and race tyranny. The Rus- 
sian, Austrian, German, the British Empire, are all 
oppressive aggregates, with their origin in conquest, 
and their standing character of race ascendency. Nor 
are France, Italy, and Sweden without elements of the 
same kind in less marked degree. All of these vast 
tyrannous empires must dissolve before we reach a 
normal state, which will be that of smaller, homogeneous, 
industrial, and peaceful republics. 

3. Without unnecessary armies and fleets, without 
scattered empires, and with no subject races to coerce, 
the sphere of the central govenment would be simple 
enough. It would be confined to maintaining order, 
providing for health, promoting and assisting industry 
in all its forms, and supplying a simple, cheap, and sci- 
entific system of law. 

4. Lastly, the temporal government would have 
nothing whatever to do with any moral, intellectual, or 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 79 

spiritual concern — neither with any church, sect, or 
creed ; with no matter of education, with no academy 
or learned society. All these things would belong to 
independent, moral, intellectual, and religious move- 
ments. And this great end has been virtually attained 
in the United States — and only there. 

Relieve government of its absorbing military duties ; 
take it out of any class interest ; remove from its sphere 
all religious questions, and suppose extinct all those 
vexed international questions, and incessant frontier 
wars in all parts of the globe, — and the sphere of gov- 
ernment becomes simple enough and hardly a matter 
for desperate contention between rival parties. 

The sphere of government would be reduced to this: 
— Protect the nation from foreign enemies ; organise 
an efficient police ; administer equal, cheap, speedy 
law ; protect, assist, stimulate, and moderate industry ; 
prevent groups encroaching on others ; stop bands of 
marauders who seek to make aggression on other 
peoples, civilised or barbarous ; provide for the health 
of great cities and of rural districts by establishing 
local bodies charged with providing air, open spaces, 
recreation grounds for the people, pure, unlimited, 
gratuitous water, which stands on the same footing as 
air, primary education, healthy comfortable homes for 
the people, museums, galleries, libraries, and other means 
of culture. These are the natural business of the local 
bodies ; the task of the central government is to stimu- 
late and control them, and arbitrate upon their mutual 
conflicts and rivalries. When government is reduced 



150 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

to these six great departments, when it is relieved from 
the care of vast armies and vast fleets, from the load 
of debt, from irritating questions of religion and edu- 
cation, from ecclesiastical patronage, from all direct care 
of education, from all hereditary pensions, from the 
absurd paraphernalia of courts, embassies, and sinecures, 
little would be left to struggle for. The national ex- 
penditure, even if doubled and trebled for public works, 
central museums, galleries, libraries, and so forth, might 
be reduced to one-third of our actual budget expendi- 
ture, which should easily be raised by a real land tax, 
a graduated income tax, increased succession duty, and 
customs and excise on luxuries only. 

The furious struggles of our modern States, rang- 
ing from revolutionary anarchy to imperialist tyranny, 
rise out of the claim to determine a set of questions, all 
of which take their origin either in military or feudal 
habits. The ambition of Tzars and Emperors to 
dominate Europe, the ambition of our own imperialist 
parties to extend an empire scattered over the planet, 
create a tyranny, against which a desperate reaction 
sets in. Note the questions about which our rival 
parties have been struggling for the last ten years, in- 
deed for twenty years ; they may all be ultimately 
traced back to war, to thirst for domination, aggrandis- 
ing the empire, securing the ascendency of some con- 
quering race or order, or maintaining the privileges, 
and ascendency of some church or creed. Jingoism, 
the foreign wars in Asia and in Africa; Zulu, Ashantee, 
Matabele wars ; Egyptian, Soudan wars ; Burmese, 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY l8l 

Afghan wars; Boer wars; the Irish struggle, the educa- 
tion struggle, the church struggle, — all have their origin 
in the effort of one race, or party, or sect, or order to 
domineer over others. When we rightly understand 
what is within, and what is not within, the sphere of 
normal government, and have forsworn war, class, and 
sect, the rage to wield political power will be found to 
be extinct. 

We should then be no more consumed with the de- 
sire to direct the government of the nation than we 
now desire to determine in what part of the city shall 
be the beats of the A Division or the X Division of 
Police. The ordering of such matters of internal ad- 
ministrative will naturally pass into the hands of those 
who have special interest and experience of such details. 
The difficulty will be to induce capable citizens to con- 
cern themselves enough in such burdensome problems. 
With a sound system of public responsibility, entire 
freedom, organised clubs, the habit of complete public- 
ity, the body of the people will exercise an ample 
general control. But, in the main, under the influence 
of a healthy education, they will be content with seeing 
that the work is well done, rather than insist on doing 
it themselves. If government were in a healthy state, 
and the people thoroughly educated intellectually and 
morally, if the sphere of government were strictly 
limited, and incapable of abuse by having no coercive 
power, we should as little hear of persons insisting on 
governing themselves as of making their own boots 
and shoes. 



1 82 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

There is an enormous fallacy involved in the for- 
mulae about people governing themselves. Strictly 
speaking, such a thing is impossible. It usually 
means that some govern the rest, usually one or very 
few govern certain groups, and then one out of several 
groups gains the ascendency for a time. Government 
means taking some one definite course out of a hun- 
dred. That one definite course in any complex case 
must originate in one directing mind, which impresses 
other leading minds, and these obtain the assent of 
more or less powerful groups, and ultimately one of 
these groups becomes strong enough to compel the 
more or less reluctant acquiescence of the rest. All 
government and all legislation, whether the govern- 
ment be that of a parliament, or of a tzar, or of a 
president elected by universal suffrage, means ulti- 
mately the will of some one, acquiesced in by over- 
whelming numbers. The despotism of the Tzar or 
the Sultan means that the decision of a ruler invested 
with divine right is supported by the superstitious 
reverence of a body of people strong enough and or- 
ganised well enough to sweep down any opposition, 
the millions paying imperial taxes, and submitting to 
enter the imperial army without a murmur. The 
government of a parliamentary party means that what 
the prime minister thinks it wise and feasible to do, 
he induces his ministry to accept, and after a great 
deal of talk and compromise, the Parliament assents 
to the measures, or Lord Rosebery retires and Lord 
Salisbury carries his bills. That is much the same 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 83 

with President McKinley in the United States or M. 
Loubet in the French Republic. There is no essential 
difference between all five cases. The people govern 
themselves strictly neither in America, France, nor 
England, any more than Russia or Turkey. Ancient 
superstition in Russia and Turkey produce a more 
absolute and imposing authority for the time. Lord 
Rosebery and Lord Salisbury are liable to be checked 
and put out of office by Parliament or a general election. 
Tzars and Sultans are liable to be blown up by Nihilists 
or strangled by conspirators, and they have just as 
much trouble with students, ministers, and Ulemas as 
any prime minister with Parliament. 

The future, we may be sure, will reduce the natural 
functions of Parliaments to those of inquiry, financial 
control, and legislation pure and simple, the elected 
Parliament meeting for moderate sessions at regular 
intervals, and having withdrawn from it administra- 
tive work, the supervision of ministerial routine, and 
any power to overthrow a ministry by a single vote. 
The presidential form of government, as recognised 
in the United States and partly in France, is a more 
natural type of government — the president being 
directly responsible to the body of the people, appoint- 
ing his own ministers, without any limitation of his 
choice to members of Parliament, or parliamentary 
approval. It is a vain bugbear to raise a cry of dicta- 
torship. It is simply efficient government with direct 
responsibility; the indirect responsibility to Parliament 
only tends to neutralise and falsify public opinion. 



184 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

The Utopia of good government, then, would be, 
that, all hereditary and class institutions being elimi- 
nated, the sphere of government strictly limited, and 
a universal education being established, the people 
would be content to trust the temporal management 
of material interests to trained experts subject to those 
conditions : — 

1. That the government have no great military 
force to compel obedience. 

2. That their measures and appointments shall be 
submitted to ample public review before they are finally 
ratified. 

3. That complete freedom of speech and criticism 
be a strict sine qua non. 

4. That the budget be voted by a chamber elected 
by manhood suffrage. 

5. That the government be directly responsible and 
removable by proper machinery, but not by a chance 
vote of a miscellaneous assembly. 

The essential difference between the ideals pro- 
pounded by Positivism and those of any despotic or 
any revolutionary school are these : The Positivist 
ideal would tend to reduce the authority of govern- 
ment whilst greatly enlarging the power of public 
opinion. The despotic and revolutionary schemes 
aim at getting into their own hands the whole existing 
force of governments, in order to set up institutions 
even more violent, arbitrary, and pitiless than those 
which exist. Positivism equally repudiates the tyranny 
of tzar, emperor, demagogue, or Nihilist. It is 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 85 

wholly neutral as between the Black Terror and the 
Red Terror. It protests equally against both in the 
name of humanity — past, present, and to come. It 
rejects the claim of Romanoffs, Bonapartes, Hohen- 
zollerns, Bourbons, or Guelphs to crush society in 
the mill of divine right and supernatural revelation. 
Nor can it recognise any kindred right in revolution- 
ists to enforce their own crudities and dogmas on 
humanity at large. It refuses to place the interests 
of Humanity, past, present, and to come, at the 
mercy of a majority of the male adults of any nation 
for the moment. The male adult voters in any country 
are always a minority of a minority in any population ; 
and it is a mere metaphysical figment that they have 
any moral claim to recast society by a vote. 

The interests of human society are those which 
humanity has created after about fifty thousand years 
of toil ; the institutions which the genius, labours, and 
martyrdom of myriads of men and women have slowly 
built up ; the interests of the living children and minors 
who are always a majority of the population, and the 
interests of the vaster majority of unborn children in 
the infinite ages to come. Positivism refuses to ac- 
quiesce in the resort to bayonets or police in any form 
(be the agents of State authority adorned with eagles 
or with caps of liberty), to impose on human life any 
kind of institutions by State authority. And it is so 
completely sincere in this refusal, that it would refuse 
with horror to have even its own programme or insti- 
tutions imposed by State intervention. 



1 86 REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 

The social evils of society do need a complete reor- 
ganisation, but by moral, religious, and intellectual 
agencies, and on these the physical force revolutionists 
have even less to offer us than the reactionists. We 
do most assuredly need a higher code of duty, more 
social and less selfish habits, a deeper and more moral 
education. But it is no more in the power of a ter- 
rorist than of a despot to decree virtue and good citi- 
zenship. The Positivist ideal of the republic is one 
in which these — the main ends of social life — are 
attained by moral means, by religious training, by edu- 
cation, by an intensely active social opinion. The main 
work of Positivism, the main instrument of humanity 
in the future, is education, in the highest and widest 
sense of the term. The State, or material system of 
external order, is merely the condition, the preliminary 
ground, for this education. The State has to defend, 
protect, sanitate, and beautify the conditions of civic 
life. It must keep order, promote health, comfort, en- 
joyment, good citizenship, by suppressing nuisances 
and all overgrown or anti-social forces, to prevent 
citizens or groups from encroaching on the free life of 
other citizens. 

A truly industrial, peaceful, cultured, and free life 
cannot be imposed by any kind of armed force or 
arbitrary law. These institutions must grow, spon- 
taneously and normally. The republic, reduced to 
a manageable size and population, freed from all war- 
like ambition and from all fear of attack from its neigh- 
bours, will have little to do but to allow the moral and 



REPUBLICANISM AND DEMOCRACY 1 87 

intellectual life of its citizens to develop in a healthy- 
way, to prevent the encroachment of any on the lives 
and labours of others, and to furnish forth the material 
life of all with adequate means. The citizens will not 
want to burn down capitals, to blow up public build- 
ings, to have a revolution once every ten years, in order 
to secure these ends. They will be willing to intrust 
power to really capable hands, watching, supervising, 
the way in which these functions are performed, dis- 
cussing the way they are performed, making their own 
wants, complaints, and suggestions plainly heard, ready, 
if need be, to take the authorised modes of replacing 
these functionaries, — if they prove finally untrust- 
worthy, — but not eternally correcting and embarrassing 
them, and not insisting on having every petty detail, 
whether of administration or legislation, voted on word 
by word in public and settled in furious party contests. 
Such is the ideal of the republic — an ideal not 
applicable perhaps, hardly likely to be considered either 
to-day or to-morrow. For it is an ideal which assumes, 
as its antecedent condition, the existence of a living 
religion of humanity. 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



Personal Reminiscences 

A Lecture given at the Women's College, Bryn Mawr, 
Pennsylvania 

I am told by the distinguished president of this 
learned body that you would rather hear me talk about 
some of the famous men and women of Europe whom 
I have known, than listen to a set discourse on any 
general or historical subject. I am very willing to tell 
you what I remember ; but I fear you can hardly be 
aware of the garrulity and egoism to which we seniors 
are prone, when invited to draw upon our memory 
of the past. Touching, as I do, on the term of life 
assigned by the Psalmist to the natural man, I can 
look back with a melancholy joy on the striking scenes 
I have witnessed and the eminent persons I have 
known. And it will be your fault if you tempt me 
to be guilty of a loquacity that may exhaust your 
patience. Remember, that in speaking of myself, I 
am acting only as a photographic plate, or a telephone 
instrument, to record impressions and to transmit 
words. And if I find anything to say that may be 
new to you, it is no merit or ingenuity of mine, but 
the simple accident that I was born in England in the 
reign of King William IV, whilst you have lived in 
America, at the end of the nineteenth century. 

191 



I92 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

I was born, I say, under King William IV ; and 
one of my early reminiscences is the coming home of 
my father from London with the news that " the King 
is dead." I was building a house of wooden bricks 
on the floor, and jumped up and asked — " Who is 
King now?" When I was told that there was no 
King, but that Victoria was Queen, I thought that a 
very poor end for a nation which had won the battle 
of Waterloo, and regretted that we had no Salic law 
in England. Do not laugh. Boys begin like that, as 
girls begin by thinking boys a mistake. But I was 
reconciled to a queen reigning over us, when I was 
taken up to London to see the Coronation. 

I shall never forget that day, which remains on my 
memory more vividly perhaps than any day of my 
life. I was a child brought up quietly in the coun- 
try, and it was my first experience of the vast city 
and the great world. Some of my family were in the 
Abbey, and I was placed in a window looking on 
Palace Yard, from which I could see the procession, 
the troops, and the crowds. I was deeply stirred by 
the masses of people, the equipages, the lines of sol- 
diers, the force, the order, and the pageant of a great 
national ceremony. I remember Victoria in the bloom 
of her youth, and all the fascination of a girl queen 
entering on the rule of so mighty a kingdom. I 
eagerly watched the Duke of Wellington, the Marquis 
of Anglesey, who lost his leg at Waterloo, Marshal 
Soult who represented France, and Prince Esterhazy, 
who was the Austrian envoy. Nor can I forget the 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



r 93 



Lord Mayor of London, in his painted and gilded 
coach, for he happened that year to be my own god- 
father. I remember questioning a huge life guardsman 
if he had killed many Frenchmen at Waterloo. (I 
rather jumped the interval of twenty-three years.) 
I inquired about the respective rank of the generals, 
courtiers, ministers, and judges, and could not decide 
whether I intended to be ultimately the successor of 
the Prime Minister or of the Lord Chancellor. That 
memorable day and its visions gave me my first defi- 
nite interest in public affairs and the organisation of a 
State. I often think with gratitude on the good sense 
of my father who took the trouble to give such an 
opportunity of education to a child of six. 

Later on, when I had come to live in London, of 
course I often saw the Queen, Prince Albert, and the 
royal family, the old Duke of Wellington, who would 
ride down Piccadilly in white duck trousers, tumbling 
about on his horse's back in a strange way, ever rais- 
ing his hand to acknowledge the salutes of all who 
passed. I used to see Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmer- 
ston, Lord Derby, and the ministers of their time, 
Disraeli, Napoleon III, the Tsar Nicholas, and the 
foreign royalties who came to our country. But as I 
never spoke to any of these exalted personages I need 
trouble you no longer with their names ; and I will 
only say that they were all extremely like the portraits 
and engravings of them we know so well, and were 
even still more like the wonderful caricatures of them 
we may see in the old numbers of the London Punch. 



194 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

I have taken you back for more than sixty years to 
remind you of all the enormous changes that have 
been introduced into the material side of life within 
my own lifetime. At my birth the locomotive had 
only just been invented, and the new police and cabs 
were on the first trial in London ; but there were 
no railroads at all except in the northern corners of 
England, no ocean steamers, no telegraph but the 
semaphore, no cheap post, no electric light or other 
apparatus, and slaveholding existed in British colonies. 
You may think that life was not worth living under 
such conditions. I can assure you that life was quite 
as pleasant. You could walk in an hour from the 
heart of London into delicious meadows and woods, 
and we wrote a letter not oftener than twice in a week. 
But what will surprise you is, that our life sixty years 
ago was essentially quite the same as it is to-day, 
except that the pace was more deliberate and the leisure 
greater. We travelled abroad, read good books, en- 
joyed society, theatres, music, pictures, games, very 
much as you do now, though perhaps with somewhat 
less scrambling and elbowing of each other, and with- 
out any wish to be for ever "breaking the record " or 
our own hearts. And the moral that a septuagenarian 
might draw from the contrast is that we were quite as 
happy as you are, and not so very much inferior even 
as men and women. 

But my business is to talk to you of the men and 
women whom I have known ; and I cannot begin 
better than with one who was loved and admired in 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



J 95 



America — I mean John Bright. I have heard some 
of his finest speeches, and to my mind, he was far the 
grandest orator of our time. The power of his oratory 
lay not in eloquence or splendour of diction, in the 
vulgar sense, but in the touching simplicity with which 
he went home to the right sense and generous sympa- 
thies of true men. When he welcomed William Lloyd 
Garrison on his visit to London in 1867, when he 
sprang to his feet in St. James' Hall to rebuke a mem- 
ber of Parliament who had insulted the Queen in a 
Reform meeting, when he described the silent cere- 
mony of a Quaker's funeral, he impressed us with the 
religious solemnity of an apostle and with the pathos 
of poetry such as we feel in the lyrics of Burns or of 
Wordsworth. I was at times associated with him in 
committees, meetings, and social and political move- 
ments, where his sterling judgment and his manly 
spirit guided many a cause. And I had frequent 
opportunities of talking to him at clubs and social 
gatherings, where he was conspicuous for genial hu- 
mour and keen insight. John Bright was hardly sur- 
passed as a canseur in his time. He retained to the 
last the tone and manner of the simple provincial 
Quaker. I remember his taking me about the streets 
and squares of the West End one fine night in July, 
when we left a dinner party at Lord Houghton's, ask- 
ing about all the great houses and crowded balls we 
passed with the amused curiosity of a country girl, and 
telling me a string of interesting anecdotes of his own 
youth and his own self-education in default of all aca- 
demic training. 



196 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

Richard Cobden I heard in one of the most strik- 
ing examples of successful oratory that even he ever 
achieved. In 1857 Lord Palmerston suddenly dis- 
solved Parliament and appealed to the nation to sup- 
port him against the Peace party in one of his wanton 
wars on China. He challenged Cobden and his friends 
to hold a public meeting in London, which even then 
was entering on its career of what we now call Jingo- 
ism. Cobden, Roebuck, and Layard held an open 
meeting to protest against a policy of war. For a long 
time the meeting, packed with supporters of the gov- 
ernment, drowned the voice of the speakers with inter- 
ruptions and noise, and Mr. Cobden himself was 
received with an outburst of opposition. Time after 
time he waited, cool and smiling, for the storm to abate, 
but every sentence was cut short by violent tumults. 
At last he was able to finish a sentence or two of 
homely wisdom, and even to get a feeble cheer from a 
few friends. Again and again he was stopped and 
hooted ; but at last he won over his hearers step by 
step. The cheers grew louder and more frequent; 
till at the end, he convinced the meeting of the justice 
of his cause, and he sat down amidst repeated volleys 
of hearty cheering. 

I have often heard Gladstone both in Parliament 
and on the platform ; but I doubt if he quite equalled 
Bright in majestic imagery as an orator, or, in convinc- 
ing logic and unanswerable facts, quite equalled Richard 
Cobden. Gladstone, of course, was immensely superior 
to both of them in range of experience, in constructive 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



I 97 



power, and in the management of men. As I fre- 
quently met Mr. Gladstone in society, both in and out 
of office, and at times have stayed for days with him 
in a country house, I had abundant opportunity to 
observe his extraordinary versatility and the range of 
his reading, the rapidity with which he was wont to 
master intricate detail, his consummate command of 
every resource, and his beautiful courtesy of nature and 
considerate forbearance with all men. 

If I were asked to pick out the three personal char- 
acteristics in which Mr. Gladstone surpassed all the 
eminent men of his time, I should choose the follow- 
ing out of his great union of diverse qualities. With 
a fiery spirit at bottom and a singularly masterful 
nature, he had a strange power of curbing himself at 
need and of keeping a cool head in the exuberance of 
his own oratory. Next, it was almost impossible to 
find any topic or incident into which he could not 
fling himself with interest and master it with rapidity. 
Lastly, of all men involved in a multitude of distract- 
ing cares, he had the most marvellous faculty of keep- 
ing his mind concentrated on the immediate point in 
hand. 

I have seen him, when Prime Minister in arduous 
times, unbend his thoughts in easy society, so as to 
engage the first girl or child at hand in gossip about 
the most trivial things that occupied their lives. I 
remember the committee of a society of which he was 
Trustee calling him in to recommend a purchase they 
were proposing for acceptance to the body of the 



I98 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

members. In twenty minutes, Mr. Gladstone mas- 
tered the details and the figures of the transaction quite 
as fully as the committee which had been studying 
them for three months. He left the committee room 
not quite convinced that the intended purchase was a 
good investment; but as the discussion went on in full 
meeting he completed his calculations and decided that 
it was. At length he rose, and opening with great 
deliberation, he stated all the points to be urged, both 
fro and contra, with extreme fairness, and left his 
hearers almost uncertain of his own bias. Gradually 
he warmed to the task, and seemed to be convincing 
himself whilst he convinced his audience, that the pur- 
chase would be good. He spoke for some time and 
ended by recommending the transaction with such en- 
ergy that no doubt was left, and the proposal was car- 
ried. In the result, it has proved to be a great success. 
I remember that in the house of one of his col- 
leagues, when he was Prime Minister, I was thrust for- 
ward, somewhat unwisely by our host, to make an 
appeal to Mr. Gladstone on a public question, which 
was almost a kind of remonstrance. For a moment 
he turned round on me with the look of an old lion 
disturbed over a meal, as he not unnaturally resented 
what seemed an intrusion on my part. I showed him 
at once that I was entirely innocent of any presump- 
tuous wish to volunteer my opinion, and was simply 
requested by his colleagues to inform him of a fact 
within my own knowledge that he ought to know. 
In an instant every sign of impatience had left him, 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 1 99 

and he invited me to speak of what I knew with the 
sweetest courtesy and kindness. 

In the power of becoming absorbed in the matter 
before him, and excluding all outside interests for the 
time being, Mr. Gladstone had no rival in our age. 
He reminded us of the old stories how Archimedes 
solved an abstruse problem in his bath and then ran 
home shouting Eureka, quite forgetting to put on his 
clothes; how he was killed by the soldiers of Metellus 
whilst poring over his diagrams ; or how Descartes, 
in abstruse meditation, walked into the lines of the 
enemy in war. Mr. Gladstone was certainly not an 
"absent-minded" statesman; but his power of abstract- 
ing his thoughts from all but the one matter in hand, 
greatly increased his energy, though it was often inju- 
rious to that all-round watchfulness which is essential 
to the minister charged with the complicated demands 
of a great empire. I have heard that in the midst of 
great political crises, when the existence of the party 
hung on some decision of the Cabinet, he would be 
absorbed in some new book on Homer, or church 
history, or the life of a college friend, until the hour 
of the meeting of council had actually struck. 

We shall know all about Mr. Gladstone very soon 
(I hope within the year) when we have the Life by 
Mr. John Morley, for which the world has so long 
been looking with expectation. It is a fortunate con- 
junction of events that the biography of our illustrious 
statesman should have fallen into the hands of one of 
his colleagues, his close friend and confidant, who is 



200 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

at the same time one of the chiefs of English letters. 
No politician knew Mr. Gladstone's mind for the later 
part of his career so intimately as John Morley; no 
English writer could so fitly expound it to the world. 
What would we not have given if Milton had written 
a Life of Cromwell — or Swift that of Walpole — or 
Burke that of Pitt ? The great writer and the great 
statesman do not often live in the same world ; and 
when they do, they are seldom bound together with 
the same sympathies and kindred ideas. 

As to Mr. John Morley himself, I am not going to 
tell you anything. He has been my close friend for 
some thirty-five years ; and happily he has still, we 
trust, to add to his great record and to complete his 
career. Of living persons I shall not speak, for I 
might have to express some difference of opinion or to 
attribute to them something they would hasten to dis- 
claim. There is no known rule such as de vivis nil nisi 
bonum. So anything that might occur to me to say as to 
such famous persons as Lord Rosebery and Sir William 
Harcourt, Mr. Morley and Mr. Chamberlain, will have 
to be remitted to my literary executors — if ever I were 
to become in my old age so garrulous and so silly as to 
presume to name literary executors at all. 

I turn then to the illustrious thinkers and writers 
with whom I have been privileged to speak, — men 
and women whose names are household words in 
America as in Europe. Not that I shall presume to 
pass any judgment upon them or to weigh their influ- 
ence, but simply to tell you in a few personal touches 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 201 

how they looked and seemed in the flesh to one who 
had the good fortune to be admitted to their presence. 
Virgilium vidi tantum : and I will try and tell you how 
he struck me. 

I did not see Carlyle until he was an old man, after 
the death of his wife, living in retirement. A more 
dignified, courteous, and friendly senior it was impos- 
sible to imagine. He sate by his simple fireside, in 
the house in which he lived for forty-six years, and 
poured out Latter-day Pamphlets with great energy 
and strong Lowland accent. The effect was startling. 
He was exactly like all his portraits — the Whistler is 
the best both in art and in likeness — the words were 
strangely the same as he used in his fiercest hour, 
nay even exceeding this, for he wished that many 
people and things "might all be dawmed doun to 
hale" — so that it seemed an illusion, as if some 
wraith of Sartor had been summoned up to give a 
mocking presentation of the prophet. He said what 
he had so often said, till it seemed to me as if he were 
repeating thoughts which were graven in his memory. 
His bonhommie, his fire, his friendly manners struck 
me deeply. Once I called on him at the request of 
Madame Michelet to ask him to subscribe to the 
monument in Paris of Jules Michelet, which he will- 
ingly did, speaking of the historian with honour and 
friendship. 

He was surprised to learn that I was a lawyer in 
practice. This he regretted, and he urged me to turn 
to letters, which did not seem to me very wise advice, 



20 2 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



as I had other interests and duties apart from letters 
or from law. For himself he told me cheerfully and 
quietly that his work was done, and he was waiting 
for the end, though at that time he was vigorous and 
able, with colour in his cheek and light in his eye. 
The last time I ever saw him was in the year of his 
death ; he was still able to walk slowly near his house, 
but he groaned heavily over the burden of life, 
and longed to be at rest for ever with his kin in 
Annandale, strictly refusing a tomb in the Abbey. 

The two Englishmen, who have held the widest 
European reputation, — Charles Darwin and Herbert 
Spencer, — are alike in this. Both reached extreme 
old age, though both, in a large part of their lives, 
were greatly hampered by very delicate health, per- 
mitting but a very restricted and intermittent study. 
As to the use of books, it is probable that few men of 
studious lives have spent so small a part of their time 
in actual reading. The right choice of books, the 
understanding of what they read, has done more for 
both of these thinkers than the midnight oil consumed 
over a library. It is genius, not omnivorous reading 
which makes the creative thinker. Darwin's concep- 
tions, which have revolutionised the thought of the 
world, were based on what he saw, on reports of com- 
petent observers, but mainly on his own marvellous 
power of coordinating disparate facts in the natural 
world. I remember him as the most courteous, sim- 
ple, and retiring of men, wholly unconscious, it would 
seem, of his own vast reputation, and of such painful 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 2O3 

delicacy of bodily frame and of such intense nervous 
sensitiveness, that he could not endure conversation 
even within his family circle for more than a limited 
time. 

That Herbert Spencer should have produced his 
Synthetic Philosophy ', and all his other works with the 
scanty time which his health has permitted him to 
give to books, is even more extraordinary than the 
case of Darwin, whose work lay largely in physical 
observation. Huxley once told me that of all men 
he had ever known, Spencer was supreme in the 
power to assimilate knowledge from the brains of 
competent students. I venture to assert that no 
thinker of his calibre has wasted so little time on 
mere reading, which should be a warning to those 
who fancy that learning can take the place of brains. 
Mr. Spencer's life for some fifty years has been a 
model of single-minded devotion to a great philo- 
sophic career. His resolute purpose to live his own 
life without hindrance from society, or distractions, or 
pursuit of fortune, fame, or rank ; his unbending 
consistency and assertion of right and justice ; his fer- 
vid enthusiasm for the cause of Peace, Industry, and 
Civilisation, form a spotless record in English letters. 

Those who have known Mr. Spencer as a friend, as 
it has been my privilege to do, in spite of occasional 
literary combats and personal " difficulties," have rea- 
son to honour his stern independence of character and 
scrupulous equity, his noble simplicity of life, and his 
affectionate regard for the friends of a lifetime. The 



204 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

intellectual and moral sympathies that so long united 
Spencer, Lewes, and George Eliot were a singular 
advantage to all three, and are memorable in the 
records of English philosophy and literature. Three 
persons, with gifts and natures so widely different, lived 
together for many years in close intimacy and mutual 
respect. In looking back over the celebrities of the 
English world in the last half century, it is a pleasure 
to think that in Herbert Spencer we have still living 
the foremost philosopher of our time, a staunch apostle 
of humanity and the moral law which our age seems 
willing to forswear. 

Thomas Huxley I used often to hear as a lecturer, 
to meet in society and at the debates of the Meta- 
physical Society. As a lecturer he was simply perfect : 
clear, incisive, illuminating, admirably adapting his 
words to the calibre of his audience. If he and I had 
sparring matches in the press or face to face, it was only 
an incident which I shared in common with others 
of every school and of any opinion. Huxley was a 
born controversialist, — " a first-class fighting man," — 
whether the subject were science, theology, or meta- 
physics, and his skill as a debater has no doubt given 
a somewhat artificial rank to his purely scientific work. 
Personally, as his letters and the memoir by his son 
would show, he was a brilliant companion, and if the 
objects of his attacks were seldom delighted with his 
vivacity, his many friends and the bystanders greatly 
enjoyed it. He would fly at a Positivist with even 
more zest than at a bishop ; nor did he always observe 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 2C>5 

the rule laid down by Justice Stephen, one of his col- 
leagues in the Metaphysical Society, that " dog should 
not bite dog ! " Huxley was always ready to go for 
mastiff, bulldog, or terrier. He was proud of having 
added the term Agnostic to the language of philoso- 
phy; and he never seemed to learn that no mere nega- 
tive could be a title worthy of a serious philosopher. 

I have spoken of John Stuart Mill at such length 
in published pieces that I will only now refer briefly 
to my own profound regard for his fine qualities and 
immense acquirements. No more just, patient, and 
generous soul ever adorned our public life. One had 
to be admitted to his intimacy and to association with 
him in the public movements, to which the whole of 
his later life was devoted, to know how warm a heart, 
what fire of enthusiasm lay covered up, like a volcano 
under snow, beneath the dry, formal, antiquated offi- 
cial which the world saw as Stuart Mill. I spent with 
him the last night I think he passed in England, but 
a week or two before his sudden death at Avignon. I 
have visited his grave in that most romantic of ceme- 
teries beside the rushing Rhone and in sight of the 
huge palace of the mediaeval Popes. And as I medi- 
tated on the strange vicissitudes of his career and the 
historic associations of his last resting-place, I was filled 
with regret that I could not have worked with him and 
under him in the new organ of Reform which in leav- 
ing England he had contemplated to found. 

From philosophers I pass to poets. And the poet 
of the Victorian era was obviously Tennyson, — just 



206 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

as Homer was " the poet" to all Greeks. I have said 
so much of Tennyson, in a published work of mine 
which bears his name on its title page, that I shall 
only touch on a few reminiscences of his person. In 
person, I make bold to say, Alfred Tennyson was the 
most striking and original figure of the whole Victo- 
rian era, if not in the whole gallery of British litera- 
ture. His noble stature, stately features, and unique 
mien, very much heightened by unconventional cloth- 
ing, would have made him an object to stare at, if he 
ever appeared in any public place, which he very rarely 
did. I saw him not seldom at the Metaphysical 
Society, of which he was one of the founders, and also 
in his own beautiful house at Aldworth, for I had the 
good fortune to occupy a cottage on the Blackdown 
within a walk of his summer home. 

When he was in the humour (which one must con- 
fess was not always) he was an admirable talker, full 
of good stories, his memories of old friends and strik- 
ing incidents, quoting lines from the poets in Latin, 
Greek, Italian, and German. He was fond of reading 
his own poems, and I have heard him recite the 
" Charge of the Light Brigade," which he was asked 
to do for the benefit of the survivors. I can never 
forget the glorious roll of the Greek hexameters when 
I have heard him declaim passages from the Iliad, as 
he strolled about his beloved Down in its mantle of 
heather and fern. He once told me how he came to 
write those magical lines in the " Princess." 

"Tears — idle tears — I know not what they mean." 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 10~] 

He had been wandering alone, he said, among the 
ruins of Tintern Abbey, thinking of the monks and 
their solitary lives in the epoch of its foundation, and 
then, looking up across the Wye, he saw the harvesters, 
girls, men, and boys gathering in their crops in the full- 
ness of life and merriment. And the contrast of the 
old world and the new filled him with emotion, so that 
the lines came to him as a spontaneous inspiration, as 
if he were simply recalling some familiar song that 
haunted his memory. 

Robert Browning, for all his original genius and fine 
culture in literature, painting, and music, had less of 
the eccentric in him than almost any famous man of 
his time. A man of the world to his finger tips, 
who knew every one, went everywhere, and had seen 
everything, he might pass as a social lion, but not as a 
poet, or a genius. His animal spirits, his bonhommie, 
his curious versatility and experience, made him the 
autocrat of the London dinner table, of which he was 
never the tyrant — or the bore. Dear old Browning! 
how we all loved him ; how we listened to his anec- 
dotes ; how we enjoyed his improvised " epitaphs in 
country churchyards," till we broke into shouts of 
laughter as we detected the amusing forgery. At 
home in the smoking room of a club, in a lady's liter- 
ary tea-party, in a drawing-room concert, or in a river 
picnic, he might have passed for a retired diplomat, but 
for his buoyancy of mind and brilliancy of talk. His 
heart was as warm, his moral judgment as sound as 
his genius was original. 



208 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

I have been present at the funeral in Westminster 
Abbey of Darwin, of Browning, of Tennyson, and of 
Gladstone. All were impressive and memorable occa- 
sions ; but they differed in tone and in form. When 
Charles Darwin was laid hard by the dust of Newton, 
to the great majority of those present he was a great 
name but not a familiar person, and in very rare cases, 
a friend. And there was something a little incongru- 
ous in the readiness of the Church to chant its Requiem 
over the bones of Evolution. At the burial of Tenny- 
son there was gathered together a great and representa- 
tive company of his devoted admirers and of English 
thought. But in the simpler funeral of Robert Brown- 
ing were to be seen hundreds of men and women whose 
eyes were dim with the feeling that they were parting 
with a dear friend and a delightful companion. The 
burial of Mr. Gladstone was at once a great national 
ceremony and a day of sincere mourning to all sorts 
and conditions of men. The Crown, the State, Parlia- 
ment, and the public service were all fully represented 
with a ceremonious simplicity of outward show that 
was so truly in keeping with him they were carrying 
to his grave. The total absence of pageantry was as 
impressive as the religious office was pathetic. And 
to thousands within the Abbey as to tens of thousands 
without, it was a day of real mourning and of solemn 
thought. 

Of John Ruskin I have written so many pieces that 
I will only add a few words of personal reminiscences. 
I knew him first, in the heyday of his youth and fame, 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



209 



forty years ago when he was living with his father and 
mother in their beautiful home at Denmark Hill near 
London. He had finished the best part of his art 
work, and was entering on his social and economic 
career in the Cornhill papers Unto this Last. I can 
never forget his high spirits, his enthusiasm, his start- 
ling paradoxes, and his beautiful deference to his aged 
father — the very model of the "canny," practical, 
punctilious Scot of the old school. " Pray, talk to 
John and teach him to respect Political Economy ! " 
he would say — and then, "John, John, what non- 
sense ye're talking ! " as John flew off on some Shel- 
leian phantasy that the cautious senior could not follow. 
He was then teaching working-men to draw — and to 
think — in the college founded by Frederick Maurice, 
Tom Hughes, Kingsley, and William Morris. No 
more brilliant and lovable personality has ever given 
life to English letters. 

From time to time I saw Ruskin again and had 
letters from him, — often wise, ingenious, affectionate, 
now and then angered by some utterance of mine which 
he condemned, and sometimes full of intense pathos and 
despair over the evil days on which he thought him- 
self to have fallen. He goaded me in Fors and by 
private letters to reply to his attacks on Darwin, Mill, 
and Spencer, and at last I did so in the little piece I 
called Past and Present, in 1876. The last time that 
I saw him, not very long before his death, was in his 
lovely mountain home on Coniston Lake, with all the 
fire and passion of his soul burnt out, his look one of 



210 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



majestic decay, as of some venerable bard of a departed 
age; gentle, calm, simple, and surrounded with every 
grace that nature and love could give to his last days. 

The Life and Letters of George Eliot by her husband, 
Mr. John Cross, sufficiently show the intimacy that I 
had the honour to retain with our great novelist for 
the last twenty years of her life. Of her, too, I have 
already spoken more than once in published pieces, 
and I can add nothing to all I have said of her noble 
qualities and vast acquirements, of her loyalty and 
goodness toward her many friends, of the singularly 
conscientious thoroughness with which she poured her 
whole life into every work she touched. Only her 
intimate friends knew the exhausting labour which she 
bestowed on her books, and the untiring patience with 
which she strove to answer every call made on her 
attention by friendship, or her own household, or any 
incident of her literary life. Everything she did was 
carefully planned and studiously worked out ; and 
whether it was a letter, the visit of a friend, a foreign 
tour, or the plot of a novel, she put into it the best 
she had, and the utmost pains to make it perfect. 
Where she failed at all, I think, was in spontaneity, 
verve, and abandon. This extreme conscientiousness 
to do everything as well as she could do it gave a cer- 
tain air of stiffness to her letters, made some of her 
books overcharged and langweilig (this is especially 
true of Romo/a), and it certainly ruined her poetry. 

One of my most interesting reminiscences was a 
little dinner at her house, when Anthony Trollope 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 211 

and she compared notes on their respective ways of 
working. Trollope said that he sat down to his desk 
every morning early and wrote the given number of 
words every quarter of an hour by the clock. George 
Eliot groaned out that she sometimes spent days in 
poor health and low spirits without producing a line, 
and often tore up and rewrote a chapter over and 
over again. " Ah ! " said Anthony, u for imaginative 
work like yours that is right and inevitable ; but my 
stuff has to be made at a more business-like rate." 

George Eliot's name reminds me of another great 
novelist, a friend of hers, the Russian TourgeniefF, 
to whom I was introduced by Professor Kovalevski. 
TourgenierFs person was the grandest I ever remem- 
ber to have seen in the flesh. With a head that re- 
called the Olympian Zeus, on an almost gigantic and 
stately frame, he looked more like an ancient hero than 
a mortal of our modern age. His simplicity, his courtly 
manners, his singular union of dignity and naivete, 
charmed every one he addressed. I can recall with 
sad interest his pathetic picture of modern Russia, 
that ambiguous land, he said, halfway between Europe 
and Asia, yet belonging quite to neither, his blushing 
over the transports of the student girls who fell upon 
his neck, whilst the youths dragged his carriage 
through the streets after his lecture at the University, 
— "a lecture," he said humbly, "that was strictly con- 
fined to Russian literature without one word of poli- 
tics." His conversation was of a piece with his fine 
manners and noble bearing, — simple, serious, instruc- 



212 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 



tlve, and poetic. I visited him in his quiet apartment 
in the Rue de Madrid looking out over a pleasant gar- 
den ; and he talked sadly for an hour of Russia, from 
which he had been so long an exile. And I cannot 
forget how he came in from Versailles once with a 
large brown-paper parcel, which he seemed to cherish 
with great care. I asked if we could relieve him of 
his burden. " Ah non 1 ' " said he, "ce sont les Soulier s 
de ces Demoiselles^ This poet of European fame was 
pleased to be the errand boy and light porter for the 
shoes of his friends' girls ! 

Another hero of European name I have seen under 
many aspects, — General Garibaldi. I met him in 
1859 in the Romagna, when he was at the head of his 
volunteer army, going from town to town and from 
village to village to rouse the people to withstand the 
return of Pope and Austrians after the Treaty of Villa- 
franca. As one passed through the Duchies and the 
Bolognese, one could tell at a glance if Garibaldi had 
been there or not. If not, in that September, all was 
stagnation. If he had been there, it was a people 
rising to arm itself. I saw him again in 1864 in his 
triumphal visit to London, when enormous crowds 
filled the streets to see him, and the excitement became 
so alarming to the government of Lord Palmerston, 
that they induced the general, by the agency of Lord 
Shaftesbury and Mr. Gladstone, to cut short his visit, 
and abruptly to withdraw to Caprera. Garibaldi and 
his friends were quite aware of the intrigues that led 
to his dismissal, — the true inner history of which was 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 213 

told in a pamphlet that was suppressed at the time, 
but which may one day be known. Some years later, 
I heard Garibaldi at a so-called Peace Congress at 
Geneva, and was personally presented to him at his 
hotel. To see him approach, to hear his voice, and 
take his hand seemed to me as if I were brought face 
to face with an apparition or a wraith. How could 
one forget the strange historic costume and red shirt, 
the sweetness of his expression and voice, the saint- 
like gentleness of his bearing, with its ineffable air of 
benevolence, as a widow woman in mourning fell on 
her knees and begged him to lay hands on her son 
and dedicate the boy to the country ? And this the 
hero did quite simply and seriously, looking for all 
the world like a picture by Luini of " Suffer little 
children to come unto me ! " 

Mazzini lives in my memory as the most impressive 
personality with whom I have ever conversed. He 
was always the apostle, the fervid preacher of a cause 
that had become his religion and his creed. The unity 
of Italy was to him a new revelation, of which he was 
inspired to tell the glad tidings of great joy. And 
what eloquence, what a torrent of thought and feeling, 
what a sublime faith in his country and its future ! 
Mazzini made one understand the influence of Savo- 
narola, — or one ought rather to say of Giordano 
Bruno, " the awakener of the souls that are asleep." 
It was a great time in those sixties for the " Giovane 
Italia!' Would that the manhood of Italy were des- 
tined to show forth in accomplishment the dreams, the 



214 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

aspirations, and the sacrifices of the noble enthusiasts 
of the Risorgimento. Nel tempo passato, era anche io 
Italianissimo : — ma adesso ! 

I was taken one night by my dear old friend Louis 
Blanc — himself one of the kindest, most honest, most 
devoted of doctrinaire democrats — to sup at the house 
of Victor Hugo. Victor had little of the poet or the 
orator about him. You might have taken him for a 
stout weather-beaten sea captain, bluff in manner, 
imperative in tone and gesture, hearty with his own 
family, and somewhat impatient with outside people. 
He was treated with a deference that is hardly shown 
in private to princes of the blood ; when he spoke, 
even in whispers to a political friend, the whole room 
was expected to maintain strict silence. " II parle," 
— said Louis Blanc, though none of us, except 
Naquet, the Senator, were permitted to hear the 
words. A fervent admirer would come up, present, 
almost on his knees, a copy of the poet's Annee Ter- 
rible, and beg the favour of the author's autograph. 
I cannot honestly say that, in the course of the eve- 
ning, I heard one word that was interesting or char- 
acteristic drop from the lips on which France and 
Europe would hang in expectation. But such is the 
way sometimes with your great poet in the flesh. To 
me it was enough to have seen this rare genius of 
modern France. He might have been a great soldier 
or sailor, — might have won historic victories or com- 
manded an expedition to the Pole. 

One other famous Frenchman, who also now lies in 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 215 

the Pantheon, I was privileged to know — Leon Gam- 
betta — in my opinion far the greatest orator of the 
century, and one of her sons to whom France has 
been least grateful. For I count it amongst the 
calamities of French history that Hoche in the Revo- 
lution and Gambetta in our time were cut off in their 
prime. I can never forget the roar of indignation as 
he bounded from his seat, when I ventured to ask 
him if France could have prolonged the struggle with 
Germany after the surrender of Paris. I was in 
France during the obstinate battle against Mac- 
mahon and de Broglie that is known as the " Seize 
Mai," and I had abundant opportunity to learn the 
extraordinary energy, sagacity, and courage with 
which Gambetta commanded the campaign which 
saved the Republic and eventually forced the Mar- 
shal to accept the second alternative of the famous 
dilemma — se soumettre ou se demettre. 

Nor can I ever forget that it was Gambetta who 
publicly proclaimed Auguste Comte as " the greatest 
thinker of the Nineteenth Century." I am now, I 
think, the only English Positivist who had personal 
knowledge of Comte. I hope one day to give some 
account of what I saw and heard. I was at once 
admitted, without introduction or appointment, to a 
long interview in the quiet apartments in Rue Mon- 
sieur-le-Prince which have been kept as a relic for 
forty-four years since the death of the philosopher. 
Of the build and energy of Thiers, Comte had the 
small stature and wonderful nerve-force that is pecu- 



21 6 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES 

liar to the men of the south. He received me a 
young Oxford student, as a pupil of Richard Con- 
greve, with singular courtesy and frankness. He 
asked me what had been my studies, what was my 
mental attitude, what I knew of his system, and 
about what I wished him to speak. It was the period 
whilst he was still engaged on his second great work, 
the Polity, with his sketch of a Religion of Human- 
ity, of which I knew nothing, for I had read little 
but Miss IViartineau's condensed translation of the 
Philosophy. I told Comte that I adhered generally to 
the Christian faith in which I had been brought up ; 
nor did he seek to disturb my beliefs. I stated in 
turn a variety of subjects on which I desired to hear 
his views. On each he spoke with entire freedom, 
clearness, and force. His oral exposition was far more 
easy to follow, and hence more fascinating, than his 
published books. As a lecturer his manner and 
resources were perfect. I left the philosopher pro- 
foundly impressed and greatly enlightened. From 
that day, I continued to study and meditate on doc- 
trines which for forty years have guided my mind and 
my life, — in humble devotion to which I trust in 
Humanity to live and to die. 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 



Municipal Government 

An Address to the Municipal Reform League of Boston 

There has long been a tendency in Europe to regard 
Massachusetts and its capital city of Boston as the true 
intellectual, artistic, and religious centre of the United 
States. It is not for me to express any confident opin- 
ion on this delicate point; but as I am pretty sure that 
such is the rooted belief of all patriotic citizens of this 
ancient cradle of New England, I gladly accept the 
invitation of the Municipal Reform Union ; and will 
say a few words on the subject of Municipal Organisa- 
tion in general. It is a topic whereon I have long felt 
deep interest, which was much stimulated when I found 
myself unexpectedly coopted as an Alderman of the 
London County Council in 1889. And I suppose 
that the problems of Municipal Organisation are pre- 
cisely those whereon the citizens of the Republic have 
to meet the severest strictures, and whereon they may 
feel the most frequent misgivings. 

I am certainly not about to repeat or expand any 
criticisms such as reach us in Europe of the weak side 
of American municipal institutions, least of all could I 
do so in Boston, where in things municipal, as in things 

219 



220 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

educational and intellectual, so bright an example of 
progress and efficiency is presented to the whole Union. 
But as Mr. Bryce has told us, "the government of cities 
is the one conspicuous failure of the United States " ; 
and the body of criticisms thereon which he has collected 
come from American and not from British sources. I 
am not about to repeat any of these criticisms, whether 
British or American ; and I think it may be more use- 
ful if I tell you something of our own difficulties and 
failures, and the methods by which we have endeavoured 
to meet them. 

I suppose there is not a single form of maladminis- 
tration, bungling, jobbery, and corruption against which 
municipal reformers in the States have ever struggled, 
but what striking examples of the same evils have been 
rife in Great Britain at one time or other. The munici- 
pal government of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin 
a hundred years ago was choked with antiquated abuses. 
And it has been after a struggle, fought inch by inch 
all through the last century, that most of these abuses 
have been gradually reduced. Close corporations, 
hereditary franchises, bribery, sale of privileges, party 
nominations, have inflicted on our citizens ill-paved 
streets, public nuisances, incapable officials, secret 
favours, impure water, feeble lighting, and a burlesque 
police. All these abuses existed unchecked in Great 
Britain down to about seventy years ago, when the 
Reform movement began in earnest. British difficul- 
ties are mainly due to antiquity and conservatism — 
the ruinous legacy of old times and of class govern- 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 221 



ment. American abuses, I suppose, are largely due 
to youth, ignorance, inexperience, and the opportuni- 
ties which unlimited democracy offers to an incessant 
immigration of refugees from Europe, unsettled, igno- 
rant, heterogeneous, and necessitous. 

In our country the conditions are reversed. Our 
emigrants largely exceed our immigrants. Our popu- 
lation is much more settled, and is organised in regu- 
larly defined classes and functions. The small area and 
dense population of our land affords a closer inspection 
and watchfulness of citizens over those institutions and 
arrangements which affect them. But the principal 
difference is this — that we have a considerable class 
of men, having wealth, experience, energy, and the 
habits of command, who are always ready to devote 
their time to the public service without reward or offi- 
cial rank. On the other hand in the Republic, the 
imperative sense of abstract equality, and unbounded 
faith in the electoral machine as the panacea and palla- 
dium of democracy, force men of wealth either to be 
idle or to stick to their counting-house, and force men 
of ability to disclaim any pretension to lead or direct 
their fellow-citizens except as their nominees and 
agents. 

Take the case of London and mark the accumu- 
lation of difficulties, — physical, legal, historical, and 
social, — material and traditional obstacles to Municipal 
Organisation of a high type. The city itself is nearly two 
thousand years old, and still retains some of the geo- 
graphical and geologic conditions that come down from 



222 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

the original Llyndyn, or the Hill in the Mud Swamp. 
Some of its streets are one or two thousand years old, 
dating from the Romans or the time when the city was 
restored by Alfred after the Danish destruction. Its 
Charter dates from the Conqueror in the eleventh 
century. Its corporation and officers date from the 
thirteenth century ; and most of its institutions have 
several centuries of antiquity. The corporation has 
long historic and even constitutional relations with the 
Imperial Government and Crown. Its privileges and 
sanctities resemble those of the palace of Westminster 
or the Mace of the House of Commons. " Baubles " 
they may be, but to touch them sends a shudder 
through British respectable society. What with the 
complications of these venerable societies, to touch the 
status quo of London institutions is to assail the Ark 
of the Covenant. And then — what with coal smoke, 
foggy atmosphere, a muddy river, and a huge city with 
an area of thirty or forty miles in circumference — the 
obstacles to municipal reorganisation in London are 
somewhat formidable. 

Prolonged and untiring efforts have at last done 
much to overcome these obstacles. The Municipal 
Corporations Act of 1835 ma de a clean sweep of the 
old obsolete monopolies, though it did not venture to 
touch the city of London which still remains a sort 
of Alsatia — or city of refuge for incorrigible survivals. 
The Metropolitan Board of Works was an attempt to 
unite the authorities of the Metropolis in one body ; 
but its incompetence and jobbery led to its end in 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 



223 



1888. In 1889 the London County Council was 
established ; and by common consent it has proved 
itself an immense improvement on the old Board of 
Works. It is truly representative of all classes of the 
kingdom, and at different times it has had as its elected 
members peers, statesmen, Cabinet Councillors, Mem- 
bers of Parliament, eminent servants of the Crown, 
lawyers, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, soldiers, 
artists, tradesmen, engineers, trades union officials, and 
working-men ; and these classes have been represented 
by a wide and honest suffrage. The body is therefore 
peculiarly democratic in constitution, whilst long pub- 
lic service and youth, wealth, rank, and labour are 
mixed together in a degree hardly to be found in any 
other governing body in England, or perhaps one may 
add, in Europe. 

This body, on which I had the honour of serving 
for some years, has certainly solved the problem of an 
elective municipal council being able to maintain a 
reputation for the strictest purity and the most rigid 
economy. Its offices have been filled by some of the 
most eminent statesmen, the most experienced public 
officials, and some of the most trusted financiers in the 
kingdom. Its first Chairman, Lord Rosebery, became 
the successor of Mr. Gladstone as Prime Minister ; 
its budget has been framed by men who have spent 
their lives in guiding the financial and commercial 
interests of the Empire : and most of its departments 
have been served with an efficiency and economy which 
might do honour to any government. In the twelve 



224 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

years of its active career the County Council has not 
been accused by its bitterest critics — for, as an emi- 
nently democratic and reforming body, of course it 
has these — with the suspicion of jobbery, waste, or 
corruption in any of its members. 

The whole of the services given by the members — 
even where they amount to very close application to 
administrative routine — are entirely voluntary. No 
member of the Council receives any salary or perqui- 
site whatever, except the Deputy Chairman, who is in 
the position of General Manager. There are no allow- 
ances of any kind for any purpose. If the councillor 
at the end of a long day's work needs refreshment, he 
has to pay for it ; and if the Chairman invites his col- 
leagues to an entertainment, he has to bear the entire 
cost. I do not know of any institution at home or 
abroad, public or private, which is served on a volun- 
teer system quite so rigid. I could tell you of hard- 
worked business men and professional men, some 
having great affairs of their own, and some with small 
affairs, who devote, not their leisure hours, but a large 
part of their busy day to the service of their fellow- 
citizens. And I might instance a philanthropic manu- 
facturer who, in middle life, closed his own works, and 
for twelve years has given every hour of his time, 
without fee or honour, to the incessant drudgery of 
departmental management, — labour which a bank clerk 
would think ill-paid by ten thousand dollars a year. 

There have been immediate effects from this creation 
of a body of men representing all sides of English 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 225 

society, and bent on carrying on the work of the 
public with strict honesty and thorough efficiency. It 
is no doubt one of the results of our having a settled 
and organised society in England, where men of wealth 
and power are brought up in a certain tradition of be- 
ing a governing class, that a democratic election sends 
to work side by side on the same benches, magnates, 
millionnaires, old officials and statesmen, men of culture, 
traders, and wage-earners alike. They have plunged 
into all the knotty problems of municipal organisation, 
— rehousing the poor, improvement of streets, sanitary 
inspection and legislation, the war against unjust 
weights and measures, against adulteration of food, the 
general regulations for city building, prohibition of 
excessive height of buildings and unsafe erections, the 
purifications of the sewers, the supply of water, gas, 
electricity, the control of tramcars, the management 
and extension of public parks, the care of a vast body 
of indigent lunatics, and the foundation of a system of 
technical education. It would be too much to pre- 
tend that all of these duties have been performed with 
equal success. But there has been no real breakdown, 
and not a breath of corrupt influence in any one of 
these departments ; and in many of them the most 
conspicuous progress has been achieved. 

One of the salient features of the London Countv 
Council is the close connection it has with the Imperial 
Legislature and Government. About one-fifth or one- 
sixth of the Council are usually members of the Legis- 
lature or retired Government officials of the higher 

Q 



226 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

rank. Every important act of the Council, be it a 
new street improvement, a scheme of water supply, or 
fresh powers for sanitary inspection, involves an appeal 
to the Legislature, and full consideration in legal form 
by committees of both Houses of Parliament. As 
these Acts of Parliament are passed only after strict 
criticism and inquiry, and as both Houses are in so 
close touch with the Council, ample publicity and 
judicial impartiality has to be given to every applica- 
tion made by the Council for fresh powers. There is 
no room in such a system for hole-and-corner Bills, 
" lobbying," or personal interests. Committees of the 
Imperial Parliament may be slow, stupid, obstructive, 
and narrow, — but they are not known to be venal, 
timid, or servile. And the Imperial Government 
rejoices in its powers of clipping the wings and prob- 
ing the schemes of the Council, which is far too 
democratic and far too favourable to Labour to find 
much encouragement in a conservative government 
of the old school. 

Not only is the London County Council severely 
scrutinised by the Imperial Government of administra- 
tion, — never very willing to show it any favour, — 
not only is it bound hand and foot by legislative 
bonds, but it is at every point open to the appeal to 
judicial decision in respect of the least infringement 
of its legal powers. The poet asked that terrible home 
question — Quid leges sine moribus ? What, indeed, 
is the good of passing laws if public opinion itself is 
corrupt ? And we may say — Quid leges sine tribunali- 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 227 

bus ? What is the good of laws if courts of justice do 
not honestly carry them into execution ? Now here 
is the strong point, the true pride of our British insti- 
tutions. From that of the Lord Chief Justice to that 
of a stipendiary magistrate, every English court is 
bound to administer the law, swiftly, impartially, in- 
exorably, without the smallest concern of wealth, rank, 
office, reputation, or influence. No judge of any kind 
is elected by anyone, nor has he anyone above him to 
give him orders, nor has he any term to his office, nor 
can he be removed, even by the Crown. An English 
judge is a Rhadamanthine being who is no respecter 
of persons, who deals out equal decisions, alike to all, 
— one to whom magnate, millionnaire, or "boss," are 
simply " the defendant," or the " prisoner at the bar." 
The effect of this is that any person, however poor 
or humble, who fancies himself to be aggrieved by 
any act of the Council in excess of its legal powers, 
can immediately bring the issue to trial, and he knows 
very well that he will get ample redress if the law is 
on his side. The judge, whether he sit in a police 
court or in the Royal Courts of Justice, will not care 
a straw whether the Defendant before him can control 
fifty thousand electors or fifty million sterling. Any 
unconscious bias he may have will usually lead him to 
suspect the doings of democratic bodies and leaders. 
And thus, the smallest attempt at jobbery, oppression, 
or corruption, whether in the Council, or any of its 
members or servants, is liable to be summarily dealt 
with by tribunals which it is absolutely impossible to 



228 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

influence, to mislead, to terrify, or to buy. The Lon- 
don County Council I take to be more free from any- 
thing of the kind than perhaps any other institution 
in our country, and the key of the system is the in- 
violable independence of the judicial body. 

I have spoken of the London Council of which I 
have knowledge from experience, but I have no rea- 
son to doubt that much the same tale could be told 
by members of the Councils in the cities of Manches- 
ter, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In 
several points I believe they could point to success 
even greater than in London, partly because they are 
less involved in the maelstrom of Imperial Politics, 
and have not to contend against obsolete institutions, 
historic rivals, and a hostile government. The pro- 
vincial municipalities of our country are for the most 
part efficient, popular, and entirely honest corpora- 
tions, working under the three great conditions of 
good order that I have noted, — strong popular inter- 
est, trustworthy representatives, and an incorruptible 
and independent judiciary. 

You may ask me if I have no reverse of the medal 
to show you, and if I mean to say that in London 
everything is for the best in the best of all possible 
cities. Far from it alas ! Our great bane, as I am 
told it is yours in all municipal reform, is the curse of 
Party Politics. London is the seat of the Imperial 
Legislature and Government, and it is also the seat of 
our Imperial Finance and Trade. Ever since the 
democratising of our Parliament in the last genera- 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 229 

tion, London has been one of the strongholds of the 
Conservative Party. Since its foundation twelve years 
ago, the London County Council, as an eminently 
progressive body, has been an object of jealousy and 
opposition to the conservative majority and govern- 
ment. And its efforts have been constantly thwarted 
by the Legislature and by the Ministry, when it has 
sought to free its citizens from monopolists of water, 
gas, and street traffic, when it has striven to tax the 
ground landlord, or to shake off the incubus of the 
antique privileges of the mediaeval city. 

We hear a good deal over our side of the water 
about your Tammanys and local rings, and as to the 
" Boss " system in American cities. Something of 
the kind is not unknown with us, under grander 
names and more sonorous forms. What is " Tam- 
many," what is a " Boss " ? You will correct me, 
but I am told the first is a close political caucus, a 
more or less secret society, pledged to vote in a body 
to keep up the material interests of its members and 
that of the classes and groups which it patronises 
and nurses. As a former mayor of a city, a very long 
way from Boston, told me, " the police of this town 
exist for the purpose of encouraging vice and of pro- 
tecting crime." They say there are certain cities 
which are run by a sort of mafia, the business of which 
is to promote jobbery and to enable monopolists to 
thrive. Well ! such things have been heard of in 
Europe, and one of the functions of our venerable 
House of Lords is to protect obsolete privileges to 



23O MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

secure the material interests of its order and the 
classes it represents, and to prevent any interference 
with monopolies, exemptions, and antique claims that 
may conflict with the interest of the general public. 
And the business of the " boss," who in our country 
has a very grand name indeed, is by magniloquent 
speeches and lofty pretensions to see that the "ring" 
keeps its own counsel and votes the straight ticket in 
silence. 

London, I believe, would have a model municipal 
government of its own were it not for three obsta- 
cles : first its physical difficulties, population, area, 
climate, ancient sites and encumbrances; secondly, 
the antique privileges and accumulation of legalised 
corporations within it ; lastly the systematic opposi- 
tion of a legislative House which is itself a typical 
monopoly and incubus. With all the differences 
between American and British municipalities, there 
are certain analogies and relations which make com- 
parison useful and instructive. Both have their 
special difficulties to meet, their special advantages to 
use. 

The cities of the United States begin with vast oppor- 
tunities in that they are free from the three obstacles 
that hamper the complete reform of London. They 
start for the most part with a clean slate. They have 
not the physical obstacles to overcome, nor antiquated 
abuses, nor any hereditary legislature to wrestle with. 
The original cities of the Atlantic seaboard — Boston, 
New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore — have had 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 



231 



some trouble in dealing with the estuaries on which the 
old colonists placed them. But these troubles are 
nothing to the narrow streets and indestructible lines of 
Old London. Most American cities have an open 
area of boundless extent which, for such cities as 
Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, attain to ideal 
conditions. The abuses of American cities are the 
creation of the last generation or two, and have not a 
rag of law or of sentiment wherewith to hide their 
deformities. And there is nothing hereditary in 
the United States, — not even misery, or vice, or 
crime. 

But these advantages, I am assured, are neutralised, 
nay, more than neutralised, by other evils. I am not 
alluding to Boston, which I have every reason to be- 
lieve is administered with a skill and an honesty that 
may compare with the most successful municipalities 
of Europe. But in other states than Massachusetts, 
I am told, the "ring" and the "boss" still flourish 
to the despair of the good citizen and the worrying of 
his life. Certainly, I have myself observed, in my 
travels through the States, eccentricities of paving, of 
building, of police mismanagement, public nuisances, 
which are more like Constantinople than this Republic. 
And when I ask how these things come to be endured 
by a people who pride themselves on being up-to-date 
in everything, if not indeed some way into futurity, I 
am told with groans that it is all owing to the " rings " 
and the "bosses," and the apathy of good citizens who 
have not the courage to face the " Camorrists," or are 



232 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 

so much absorbed in their own private affairs that they 
have no time to give to the interests of the public. 

They would have the courage to face the " Camorra," 
if every Judge in the United States were as free from 
any thought of fearing or favouring a " boss " or a 
" ring," as he would be of fearing or favouring a com- 
mon pickpocket or a betting gang. And there would 
be plenty of competent men willing to give their time 
and service to the public, if the example of Boston 
and of the state of Massachusetts were more generally 
followed throughout the Union. Here we find a con- 
siderable class of citizens, quite satisfied with the for- 
tunes they have inherited or made, who are ready to 
devote the rest of their lives to literature, science, and 
the conduct of public affairs. Hence have sprung all 
the Libraries, Athenaeums, Colleges, Institutions, and 
Associations that delight the visitor in New England 
with their splendid endowments and admirable organi- 
sation. Splendid endowments are common enough 
throughout the States ; but what is needed, especially 
in the newer states of the Republic, is a larger body 
of citizens of high culture and of spotless character 
who will show the way and direct their fellow-citizens 
in the path of reform. 

The needs of the municipal reformer, I suppose, 
may be condensed in these two requirements : in- 
corruptible judicial and legislative authorities ; and 
secondly, the creation of a large class of men of culture 
and eminence, who will freely take the burden of 
public government in the sole interest of their fellow- 



MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT 233 

citizens. The complete absence of all hereditary dis- 
tinctions, the rule of abstract equality between all 
citizens, and the almost superstitious reverence of 
democratic doctrines make it no easy task for culture 
and superiority to gain a legitimate influence in the 
absence of great wealth or ambitious intrigue. But it 
has to be done if the "ring" and the "boss" are not 
to be perpetual institutions in the Republic ; and 
though it takes time, it will be done in the end. 

If a Reformer from the Old Country may give a 
word of encouragement and of caution to the Re- 
formers of the New World, it is that they must make 
up their minds for a long pull, a strong pull, and a 
pull altogether. Municipal Reform is a very slow 
business, even slower than Parliamentary Reform or 
Political Reform. It has taken us in England the 
best part of a century ; and we are not at all through 
our task even yet. Reformers must not be dis- 
heartened by the very gradual progress in their efforts. 
Progress often comes when it is least expected ; for it 
depends very largely on waves of emotion unforeseen, 
and sudden revivals of conscience in the masses. 
Then again, the obstructives are all inspired by self- 
interest ; and self-interests are continually coming to 
loggerheads amongst themselves. I will never suffer 
a doubt to cross my mind of the ultimate triumph of 
the Reformers ; for their permanent failure to sweep 
away the municipal abuses of to-day would inflict a 
lasting wound on the welfare and the honour of the 
Republic itself. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



The Nineteenth Century 

An Address given to the Nineteenth Century Club of 
New York 

When I was honoured by an invitation to speak at 
a meeting of this famous Club, I felt very great doubt 
if I was at all adequately endowed or even justly 
entitled to do so. For I am opposed by conviction 
to what I am told is a first principle of the club, a 
debate of contrary opinions, and I am conscious of 
being curiously incapable myself of carrying on such 
a contest so as to afford the audience either profit or 
amusement. 

Nothing, I think, is more idle and even mischievous 
than apodeictic debates in public, where no practical 
conclusions are possible or sought for, which end in 
mere talking parades, and where conviction is not 
desired nor sincerity of belief expected. I well remem- 
ber the late Courtlandt Palmer consulting me in Eng- 
land when he contemplated the foundation of the Club 
on the basis of free (i.e. contradictory) discussion; and 
I gave him the historic advice given to those about to 
marry — " Don't ! " The usual result of advice given 
of course followed, and the logomachy was started and 

237 



238 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

has flourished. I differed from several of the views 
of Mr. Palmer, and in none more decidedly than in 
this. But when I received the invitation of the lady 
whom many years ago I had known in Europe, and 
who now takes so active a part in the literary and 
social life of New York, I resolved to do my best 
and trust to your good nature. 

In all matters of freedom of thought I am heartily 
with you, and only doubt if freedom of speech is always 
the same thing. But as I am assured that this is a real 
Temple of Truth, and that sincerity of conviction is 
the motto of the Club, I will not venture on any of 
the current platitudes about the glories and progress 
of the Nineteenth Century, but I will frankly speak my 
whole mind, and come at once to the moral, religious, 
and social questions which underlie and are as impor- 
tant as railroads, telephones, and mammoth trusts. 
The new century on which we have just entered is a 
time for retrospection ; and the least thoughtful of 
us can hardly help turning backward some passing 
thought about the Nineteenth Century which we have 
just laid to rest. I look back on it myself with a cer- 
tain pathos as becomes my own time of life, as is 
natural to a veteran who remembers exactly two-thirds 
of the Nineteenth Century himself, and who doubts if 
its close fulfilled all the promise of its middle life. 
Not that I am a pessimist; but then I am no optimist. 
I am, as George Eliot said, a meliorist, who may believe 
that things are bad and may be even worse — but still 
are certain to be better one day. 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 239 

I shall of course confine what I have to say to my 
own country and to Europe, and shall trust that the 
people of the United States have an easier record to 
look back on. In our own country I can remember 
the whole reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901, 
and can recall the coronation, the public festivals, the 
two Jubilee ceremonies, and the funeral in February 
last. My boyhood was passed in the stormy times 
of the Irish Famine, Chartist agitations, Free Trade 
struggles, Railroad manias, Bank panics, and the Euro- 
pean revolutions of 1 848-1 849, 1850— 185 1. These 
were the days of Wellington, Peel, Russell, O'Connell 
Palmerston, Disraeli, and Derby, all of whom I often 
saw and heard, and followed with intense interest their 
political action. Wordsworth was the Poet Laureate, 
and Tennyson gave the promise of his splendid youth. 
Macaulay, Hallam, Grote, and Milman were the his- 
torians. Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, Kingsley, the 
Brontes were the romancists. Stuart Mill, Spencer, 
Carlyle, Ruskin were the prophets. Owen, Lyell, 
Faraday, Whewell were the men of science. New- 
man, Keble, Maurice, Martineau were the theologians. 
I doubt if we can show to-day a roll of equal power. 
I am certain that we cannot show to-day so high a tone 
of thought and feeling as that which inspired these men 
having gifts most dissimilar and beliefs so various. 

But I pass from the memories of my early school 
and college days to the middle of the century, which 
coincided with my own entering on manhood. I cast 
my thoughts back to the hopes and ideas that were 



24O THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

current in Europe when the first International Exhibi- 
tion was opened in May, 1851, and men fondly thought 
that the world was entering on an era of peace, industry, 
and progress. The dream was broken by the coup 
d'etat of Napoleon and the revival of the Empire; and 
soon followed the years of Crimean War, and then the 
Franco- Austrian War of 1859, and the Bismarckian 
wars of 1 864-1 866; and the great Civil War in the 
United States ; and so on down to the great Franco- 
German War of 1 870-1 871. How truly melancholy it 
is to find ourselves forced by the tide of things to count 
epochs by wars, as if bloodshed and waste were the 
true landmarks in the progress of mankind. But wars 
and all they bring with them and all they leave behind 
them so colour the course of civilisation that they still 
remain the typical dates. 

Now, my point is, that the generation counting 
from the abolition of Protection by Sir Robert Peel, 
down to the culmination of Bismarck when the Ger- 
man Empire was proclaimed in 1871, was an epoch 
of loftier ideals, more generous efforts, more robust 
intellects, healthier morality, and a saner philosophy 
than the generation which saw the close of the Nine- 
teenth Century. The beginning of that generation 
saw such men as Wellington, Peel, Russell, Palmer- 
ston, Brougham, Cobden, Bright. The close of that 
generation was the epoch of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord 
Derby, Lord Shaftesbury, Forster, and Mill. It was 
the era of the great movement for Free Trade, — 
which in our country, at least, was a social and moral 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 24 1 

reform that struck at a selfish and antiquated mo- 
nopoly. It was the era of Parliamentary Reform and 
the removal of the abuses of a mere class representa- 
tion of the people. It saw an immense reform in our 
system of taxation, which was made the most just 
and rational in the civilised world. It saw reform in 
the law : the emancipation of women from antique 
disabilities ; the emancipation of workmen from op- 
pressive laws and industrial serfdom. Finally, it saw 
the institution of a generous system of popular educa- 
tion. In Europe, it was the era of the overthrow of 
the effete tyrannies of mediaeval and papal despotism, 
of the consolidation of Italy into a united nation, of 
the consolidation of Germany as a united nation. In 
France it saw the restoration of the Republic which has 
now lasted for more than thirty years. And in your 
country it saw the freedom of the Republic from the 
curse of slavery, the consolidation and the vast expan- 
sion of the commonwealth in area, in wealth, and 
in power. This age, I say, lived in a higher moral 
plane than does our age to-day. It was an epoch of 
humanitarian aspiration, not always wise, but with gen- 
erous, moral, and social ideals before its eyes. 

It has been my happiness to have listened to some 
of these moral and social ideals as they fell from the 
lips of those who led the thought of the Nineteenth 
Century. I had oral exposition of his system from 
Auguste Comte, whom Gambetta named as " the 
greatest thinker of the century." And for fifty years 
now I have diligently searched and reflected on his 



242 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

writings. The English philosopher, who in so many 
ways may be compared with Comte, and in so many 
ways must be contrasted with him, — Herbert Spen- 
cer, — I have known for forty years. In spite of 
some serious differences of opinion, I have never 
ceased profoundly to respect him, above all at this 
season, as the Englishman who has most emphatically 
condemned the recrudescence of the evil genius of 
war, conquest, and oppression of the weak by the 
strong. Nor can I ever forget the social inspiration 
that John Stuart Mill gave to his contemporaries, to 
such men as John Morley, and Leonard Courtney, 
Henry Fawcett, Sir Charles Dilke, and Auberon Her- 
bert. To have listened to Carlyle, or Ruskin, or 
Mazzini, or George Eliot, as they descanted on their 
hopes of the future and their forebodings over the 
present, was to hear that which was at once a sermon 
and a poem. Tennyson, Browning, Hugo, and Mat- 
thew Arnold were our poets in those days, — men 
who at least " uttered nothing base," if some found 
them at times obscure or incoherent. To listen to 
John Bright on some great cause which touched his 
soul was to have a revelation of the just, stalwart, 
religious spirit of a Puritan of old. Will the Twen- 
tieth Century give us another Charles Darwin, — that 
immortal type of the man of science, inexhaustibly 
patient, preposterously modest, humble, retiring, and 
constitutionally careful never to go one step beyond 
his evidence ? Will it give us another gentle, unas- 
suming idealist like Tourgenieff, another historian 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 243 

compact of sympathy and imagination like Jules 
Michelet, another master of language like Renan, 
another orator and tribune of the Republic like Leon 
Gambetta ? It was a liberal education to have spoken 
to these men face to face, to have heard their voice, to 
have watched the expression of their look as their 
thoughts rose to the lip. 

Ever since the apotheosis of Bismarck in 1 871, we 
have had in these latter thirty years imitation Bis- 
marcks, wars of conquest and aggression, the policy 
of Blood and Iron, inflation of trade and of territory, 
"paying" wars, the enthronement of Imperialism. 
There have been wars in Europe, in Africa, in Amer- 
ica, and even in the Pacific ; wars in the Balkan, in 
Asia Minor, in Crete, in Greece, in Armenia, in 
Egypt, in the Soudan, in Abyssinia, in Tunis, in West 
Africa, and in East Africa, in Central Africa, and in 
South Africa ; in Madagascar, in Tonquin, in Siam, 
in Burmah, in Northern India, in China, in Corea, in 
Cuba, in the Philippines. All of these have been 
begun, or continued, or have ended in domination, in 
a scramble for territory, ascendency, or loot. All have 
been needless, unjust, ultimately ruinous to the de- 
feated and to the victors alike. 

The people have caught the infection from their 
rulers, and are as thoroughly drunk with the lust of 
dominion as kings and ministers. Democracy has 
been discovered to be a more facile instrument of the 
"pirate boss" than aristocracy or monarchy itself. 
Imperium et libertas was the serio-comic motto of cyni- 



244 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

cal Jingoism. It has proved to be merely one of 
the catchwords of the fraud. The real motto of this 
policy of Expansion is Imp er turn et servitudo. Empire 
spells slavery : moral, spiritual, economic, political sub- 
serviency. The connection of domination with servi- 
tude is as obvious as it is inevitable. To extend the 
rule of a nation over another race, be it barbarous or 
civilised, necessarily involves war ; and if it be with an 
uncivilised people or a loosely organised people, it 
involves war usually in its most brutal form. 

War, by its very nature, involves internal union 
and discipline, and ipso facto compels the suppression 
of all differences of view, the silencing of all criticism, 
and the postponement of all reforms. " So much the 
better," cry all obstructives and reactionaries — the 
bigots, the bullies, the privileged, and the monopolists. 
Some dreamy enthusiasts, like the crazy decadent hero 
in Tennyson's Maud, or the militant Boanerges of the 
churches have glorified these wars as schools of disci- 
pline, loyalty, and all the moral virtues. A war such 
as that led by Hoche, or Abraham Lincoln, or by 
de Wet may be all this. But a war of domination is 
a school of tyranny, injustice, and selfishness. Empire 
and war are such terrible ventures, so fraught with 
ruin and shame to those who fail, so disastrous to 
nations, and so full of horrors to the men and women 
of the defeated race, and not seldom to the conquerors 
as well, that when nations enter on them, they feel 
they must win or perish. They sacrifice everything 
rather than fail in their enterprise. If the cause is 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 245 

good, they are heroes ; if the cause be bad, they be- 
come demons. And so they lie to themselves, they 
let men lie to them, they lie to one another, that their 
cause is good, knowing in their hearts that it is evil. 

A nation given over to a wanton and unjust war — 
and all wars that are not in self-defence are unjust and 
wanton — is like a man given over to the madness 
of gaming. One throw more — be the issue misery 
or hell. They fling their very children to the wolves 
to speed the car of victory on its wild course. They 
mortgage their homes and their all to fill the bottom- 
less pit of the war chest. Poetry dribbles down into 
a bloodthirsty doggerel — mere echoes of the weary 
catches they sound round the campfires in the veldt. 
Religion dribbles down into sanctimonious sermons 
on the holiness of war — one of the blessings, say the 
prelates of the Church, which the God of Mercy and 
the Prince of Peace vouchsafed to his creatures whom 
he made in his own image. 

The infection extends to all forms of thought as 
well as to all forms of social progress. And as I con- 
trast the last years of the century with its middle 
period, I find not progress but decadence. I indulge 
in no morbid Jeremiad nor in senile ill-humour with 
inevitable change. But, if it were my last word, I 
would insist that the close of the century has failed to 
fulfil the promise of its youth and of its prime. 
Forty or fifty years ago, the philosophy of Evolution, 
of Positive Science, of the new conception of Sociology, 
the vast world open to thought and to human life by 



246 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

the Reign of Law in the moral and social realm as in 
Nature and Physics — these conceptions filled the air 
as breathed by all solid and serious minds. To-day 
philosophy is stagnating in metaphysical maundering 
over " philosophic doubts," things which are verbal 
conundrums rather than thinkable realities. And 
Theology is evaporating in Christian Science, The- 
osophy, and the Mahatmas of some esoteric jargon. 

I am not concerned to repeat the popular hymns to 
the scientific and material advancement of the Nine- 
teenth Century, to the marvels of our mechanical in- 
ventions, to our colossal trade, wealth, industry, and 
energy. We all admit it ; we all know it well, for it 
is dinned into our ears day and night by the brazen 
throats of a myriad-voiced press and the popular 
orators of our age. As the great orator of Athens 
said, " no need for long speeches to men who knew 
it all by heart." Not that I doubt, or dislike, or 
undervalue all this material progress. I am as heartily 
interested in it as the most up-to-date editor or the 
lightning leader-writer of the one-cent press. I am 
no obstructive, who desires a return to the Middle 
Ages or the narrow world of our grandfathers. Men 
of genius like Carlyle or Ruskin who do preach this 
only make us smile, and so far ruin the weight of all 
they say. 

I am a modern, desirous to be up-to-date in all 
things, and heartily fond of all inventions, " notions," 
and appliances which do not tend to degrade our lives 
or drive us silly by their rattle or their pace. Let us 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 247 

give the able editor, the demagogue, and the syndi- 
cate promoter all he asks and all he boasts. There is 
another side to the picture of human life. And I make 
bold to say that, intellectually, spiritually, morally, 
socially, the close of the century, as contrasted with its 
prime, is to my eyes a picture blurred, darkened, and 
out of harmony and proportion. It is a fall from a 
higher plane, with its atrocities in South Africa, its 
desolation of two fine lands, its atrocities in China, in 
Cuba, in the Philippines, with its appalling famines 
in India, its infamies in Asia Minor, with its hideous 
slums in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, and 
Chicago, with its recrudescence of savagery, with its 
exploitation of the labourer, and its apotheosis of 
Capital. 

And what is the cause of all this — what is the under- 
lying perversion of mind and feeling that has set up 
this dry rot in our age ? It is no one thing. It is 
a subtle, complex, conglomerate set of causes. In the 
first place, the apparent triumph of the policy of Blood 
and Iron in 1871, the visible gains won by Force, Am- 
bition, and Selfishness. I am not speaking of the 
Franco-German War in any special sense ; but of the 
Bismarckian policy as a whole. Bismarck presented 
to the admiring world the type of a practical and judi- 
cious Napoleon Bonaparte, who did not fail and ended, 
not in St. Helena, but with two hundred millions to 
his account, which his people laid out in very profitable 
investments. This novel combination of glory, hero- 
ism, and good business turned the heads of men in 



248 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

Europe, from the British islands to the shores of 
Tonquin and Corea ; and perhaps they find a modest 
echo on your side of the Atlantic as well. 

Then came the enormous multiplication of mechani- 
cal contrivances and material advancement. But, whilst 
all this gave marvellous facilities to human life, it un- 
doubtedly tended to vulgarise it, and stifled no small 
part of the poetry and romance of daily existence. 
The lovely country of Shakespeare became blackened 
with furnaces and pits. The roar of the railroads dis- 
turbed the peace of Gray's Elegy in a Churchyard 
and the serene meditations of Rydal Mount. And 
motors and tramcars invaded the quaint haunts sacred 
to the memory of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Lamb. 
Even the London of Pickwick and of Pendennis has 
vanished ; and the modernised city, however magnifi- 
cent and convenient, is not the soil which breeds more 
Pickwicks or Wellers. No one denies that the mod- 
ernity of our daily life has given us vast facilities, 
but it somewhat tends to vulgarise it. 

The marvellous diffusion of mechanical appliances 
for the use of science, whilst it has given us some as- 
tonishing means of observation, has tended to sub- 
divide science into an infinite series of specialised and 
detached studies. The historian finds it necessary to 
limit himself to his two or three decades, or at most a 
century or two ; the astronomer is either a strict nebu- 
list or a confirmed lunist ; the naturalist spends his life 
over the particular bug which bears his own honourable 
name. And so, the philosophy of the Rerum natura 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 249 

is relegated to popular manuals. Synthesis, or the 
theory which coordinates real knowledge, is mocked 
at as the vapouring of a crank. And the human value 
or usefulness of knowledge is thought to be vulgar 
curiosity. The enormous mass of accumulated facts, 
and their infinitesimal subdivisions have not only made 
their coordination next to impossible, but have made 
the idea of their coordination a dream like that of the 
"philosopher's stone." 

Orthodox religion lost its creed, when its dogmas 
were found to be irrational and its history was proved 
to be fictitious. Its sacred books were discredited as 
substantial truth and were valued for their literary 
beauty and their sentimental charm. The result was 
that the moral system of orthodoxy was in conflict 
with the modern conscience. So the current theology 
took refuge in platitudes, in sentimental rhetoric about 
the loveliness of Jesus which nobody ever denied, and 
the cc secret of Jesus," of which every one had his 
own interpretation. Having paid this homage to the 
Founder of their religion, the churches broke forth 
into hymns of triumph over the men who carried 
famine, bloodshed, ruin, and rape over the defenceless 
homes of innocent families in Africa and in Asia. 

All this time not a word has come from our dom- 
inant Philosophy, or Science, or Religion to protest 
against the enormities which Christian powers have 
been perpetrating in China, enormities of which some 
cannot be described to the ears of women. The Nine- 
teenth Century has left us a terrible legacy of prob- 



250 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

Jems — moral, intellectual political; international rival- 
ries, industrial wars, metaphysical sophisms, cloudy 
theosophies, moral cancers. Can we of the Twentieth 
Century solve them ? Will our electrical machines 
solve them, our telephones, our aerial telegraphs, 
and our X-rays ? Will our wealth solve them ? 
Or our numbers, our discoveries, our imitative wit ? 
Will the waving of flags — -whether with the three 
crosses or the forty-five stars — solve them, or will the 
shouting doggerel about Britannia or Columbia save 
us ? Will our current Christianity save us ? Why ! 
the Churches, Episcopal, or Presbyterian, Baptist and 
Quakers have joined to bless the buccaneers; and 
our Christian armies, led by the favourite lieutenant 
of the most ostentatiously pious sovereign whom 
Europe has known since Louis XI, have committed 
atrocities in China, in the name of Christ, more abom- 
inable than those of the Crusades or the Inquisition. 
The lesson of the Nineteenth Century is that our 
morality, our philosophy, our religion have broken 
down. It is Mene, Mene, Teke/, Upharsin to our con- 
ventional morality, our nebulous philosophy, our 
hypocritical religion. Unless the Twentieth Cen- 
tury can recast morality, philosophy, and religion we 
shall go down a steep place into the sea like the herd 
of swine. 

We need a social morality, an international moral- 
ity, based on a genuine sense of altruism. We need 
a solid philosophy based on proof and leading up to 
the highest moral ideals of active life. We need a 



THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 25 1 

religion that shall have a creed as certain as geometry 
and the laws of physical science, and as wide and com- 
prehensive as the human race. But, as I said before, 
I am no pessimist, but a real meliorist with unshaken 
confidence in a better time to come. The Nineteenth 
Century did not exhaust itself. It produced a new and 
systematic science of Sociology, the greatest advance 
of human thought since the Copernican and Cartesian 
renovation of science. That new science is instituted, 
however incomplete and however various its forms as 
yet. The systems of Comte, of Spencer, of Hegel 
may differ. But the conception of Sociology united 
them all. Sociology is the contribution of the Nine- 
teenth Century to the philosophic evolution of Hu- 
manity ; and no century since that of Aristotle has 
ever made a contribution of deeper import and of 
richer fruit. The Nineteenth Century too evolved 
the conception of Humanity, the greatest conception 
evolved since that of the unity of the Godhead ; and 
with that came the underlying conception of the 
brotherhood of Man, the solidarity of classes, the 
greatest good of the greatest number. 

The Nineteenth Century produced also a definite 
Religion — not a new religion — but the eternal im- 
perishable Religion of Humanity, which existed in 
germ at the dawn of civilisation, which will be the 
strength and consolation of the Last Man in the Last 
Day of earth. I do not say this by way of limiting 
it to the special sense that Auguste Comte gave to 
that idea. I mean that religion of Humanity, which 



252 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

to-day is the secret hope and ideal at the bottom of 
our hearts and at the back of our brains. I mean 
that undefined but indestructible sense which is the 
religion of all good men and of all loving women, 
which some choose to call the ideal of Jesus — call it 
what you will — for the religion of Humanity incor- 
porates, adapts, explains, and developes the inward 
spirit of the Gospel and the sermons of Paul. But it 
has this, which neither the Gospel of Confucius, nor 
of Buddha, nor of Jesus, nor of Luther, nor of Wes- 
ley ever had or pretended to have. That new char- 
acteristic which is peculiar to the religion of Humanity 
— which every superhuman theology cuts itself off 
from having — is a grasp of the whole field of human 
history; intense sympathy with every son and daughter 
of the human family, of whatever race, skin, or type; 
and above all, a trained knowledge of the vast results 
of science — the will and the wisdom to use this 
knowledge to the furtherance of a higher civilisation. 



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